Should I "Renew My Membership" in the GOP?

I don't know how this keeps happening. Many of you possibly remember my post of January 6, 2013, politely refusing my generous invitation to join the NRA. Well, this time, I have received a personal invitation from the chair of the Republican National Committee to "renew my membership" in the party, even though "my name is not among the active Republicans in Racine." I am not sure why his missive assumes that I have ever been a "card-carrying member" of the GOP. Anyone who has even has the slightest idea of my ideological and political persuasion could never have imagined that I was ever a Republican, < My parents would spin in their graves and haunt me for the rest of my life.> even in those long-ago days when the GOP was a legitimate political party with a genuine--though largely wrong-headed-- commitment to "the general welfare." I have known and worked with a number of genuine Republicans; most are appalled at the perverse caricature of a responsible political party that has subverted their organization, and made a mockery of its principles. I  am not in the least surprised that Mr. Priebus has emerged as the leader of this despicable remnant of what was once a tolerably responsible and reasonable "loyal opposition."

I am perplexed that the current chairman has allowed this letter to be sent over his signature. I first became aware of him in 2010  when he waged a vicious and thoroughly dishonest campaign against the election of State Senator Bob Wirch, one of the most decent and upright public officials that I have ever had the honor of knowing. Based upon Priebus's "mud-slinging" television spots and public appearances, I marked him as one of the slickest and sleaziest snake oil salesmen I had ever encountered.  Everything that he has done and said since then has only reinforced that initial repulsion. God help me, he has even caused me to nurture at least a grudging respect for the "integrity" of Nixon, Reagan, and "W."

The type of Republican that I have respected in the past  has been marginalized or destroyed by the right-wing reactionaries/anarchists. The saga of that hijacking is spelled out in graphic detail by Geoffrey Kabaservice in his Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party. He forthrightly acknowledges that the party's moderates themselves played an unwitting role in their own destruction by helping to propel Newt Gingrich and his supporters into control of the House of Representatives in 1985. Like the moderates and conservatives  in Germany who allowed Hitler to assume power because they believed that they could "control" him, mainstream Republicans of the mid-1980s calculated that Gingrich could help
forge a coalition that would end forty years of Democratic rule. They ignored the warning of minority leader Robert Michel, who "embodied the moderate's political sensibility," that House Republicans "also have an obligation to the American people," and to be "responsible participants in the process." They soon discovered, as Kabaservice cogently asserts, that "there were few things more dangerous than getting what you want." They failed "to protest as Mr. Gingrich transformed their party into an ideological faction and set it on its present course of anti-government radicalism."   Republican Congressional moderates loyally and unwittingly followed Gingrich's lead, but the new Speaker "couldn't control the troops on his right flank because their real loyalty lay not with the party, but with the conservative movement." Even before databases and computers, and "gerrymander-loving legislatures allowed Republicans to draw safe conservative districts, the true believers enjoyed the support of a vast right-wing infrastructure of outside donors, highly motivated grass-roots supporters, think tanks, and media outlets." As the party's demographic base continues to shrink, he laments, the GOP "won't change course until the Gingrich strategy for winning House elections stop working."

His analysis was mirrored in an October 22, 2013 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times entitled "The Cry of the True Republican." The true Republican in question was John G.Taft, who styled himself "a genetic Republican," and that "five generations of Tafts have served our nation as unswervingly stalwart Republicans." His great, great, great grandfather, Alphonso, was a confidant of Abraham Lincoln and one of the founders of the Republican Party in the 1850s. His great grandfather, William Howard, was the only man ever to be both President and Chief Justice.
 His grandfather, Robert, Sr., was the party's three-time presidential candidate and long-time minority leader of the Senate in the 1940s and 50s. He was universally regarded as "Mr. Republican." His father, Robert, Jr., was also a U.S., while his cousin was two-term Republican governor of Ohio. If his grandfather, "Mr. Republican," were alive today, John Taft insists, "I can assure you that he wouldn't even recognize the modern Republican Party, which has repeatedly brought the United States of America to the edge of a fiscal cliff--seemingly with every intention of pushing us off the edge." The Republican Party, he intones, "is (or should be) about responsible behavior," and "is (or should be), at long last, about decency" As a progressive, I have mixed emotions about the impact of the Taft dynasty upon the development of our country, but I, at the very least have to give them this: They wanted to govern the country, not destroy it.

Not so Mr. Priebus and his merry band of fanatics. The opening salvo of his invitation to me asserts that "President Obama is moving at a shocking rate to further expand government until America is unrecognizable." He assails Obama's "failed left-wing policies." < Obama a "left winger"? Not according to any definition of left-wingers of which I am aware. I proudly acknowledge my own "left-wing" proclivities and insist that the President, to my sorrow and frustration, much more resembles those long-ago moderate Republicans with whom Messrs. Kabaservice and
Taft nostalgically identify.> The letter asserts that we "are now in a virtually hand-to-hand battle for the very survival of the America you and I love." The most immediate goal for 2014 is to win control of the Senate, and  "effectively cut President Obama's term in half, and end his drive to give government control over all aspects of your life."  My "urgently needed support will also help conservative candidates, from the grassroots up," because we "are refocusing and rebuilding our Party on the conservative principles that will slam the brakes on the skyrocketing $17 trillion national debt and improve the lives of average Americans." Our goal, he reiterates is nothing short of winning a victory that will permanently end President Obama's drive for socialist-style policies, restart real economic growth and repeal and replace Obamacare with a market-based system." <Isn't that the system we already have, save for Medicare, Medicaid, "socialized medical care" for members of Congress, the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, and some veterans? This is the system that has consistently been ranked the most expensive and least effective among the OECD nations?> With my membership, I can help the GOP "seize control of the Senate and maintain our Majority in the House by making sure these Democrats are held responsible for the devastating impact of Obamacare <Isn't it still in its registration phase, and hasn't its legitimacy been upheld by both houses of Congress and by the Supreme Court?>, and the deepening  economic misery caused by President Obama and Harry Reid? <Those two did it all by themselves, without any help from "W', Wall Street, the Tea Party, and a whole raft of Republican legislators and administrators?>

Mr. Priebus concludes by asking if I "am not troubled by how President Obama is shredding the Constitution by ignoring and not enforcing laws he doesn't like and appointing judges who want to rewrite the Constitution <Actually, that sounds a lot like the current conservative Republican majority on the Supreme Court.>? If so, "it is imperative that you answer today."  So I guess that I should RSVP my regrets, ASAP.

Me and David Broooks Finally Agree--Sort Of

I never thought that I would see the day when New York Times' resident conservative David Brooks and yours truly would agree on anything, but that day has arrived--SORT OF. In a "conversation" with Gail Collins in the January 9 edition of the Times over the Affordable Care Act< remember that? It is the real name of the program that even most liberals and the mainstream media have allowed themselves to be suckered into calling "Obamacare.">  In the course of their "conversation," Brooks acknowledges that "Either you have a truly centralized single-payer system or you have a truly decentralized market-based system. This hybrid of semi-centralized, semi-market-based may magically combine the disadvantages of each approach." He goes on to say that "campaign finance reform is like that, too. We should either have straight-up public financing of elections, or complete transparency in political giving." Needless to say, I favor the "left pole" of both his spectra (i.e. "a centralized single payer system" and " straight-up public financing of campaigns"), while he obviously favors the other extreme.   

Mr. Brooks is confident of his positions because "the public seems to have a problem with coercion in any form," so much so that any government program <health care or whatever> "would have to be built around a paradigm of individual choice, even if it nudges the choices one way or the other. Other paradigms are just not culturally acceptable anymore." Of course, what he regards as "culturally acceptable anymore" is the result of more than three decades of carefully-crafted propagandizing by the radical right and its corporate/advertising/ brainwashing machine.It is grudgingly hard not to be impressed by the magnitude of their achievement. While true progressives passively watched, "Centrists," "Third Way" gurus,and the Democratic Leadership Council convinced most Democrats  that winning presidential elections the was "the only thing thing"--even if that meant abandoning or watering down the programs that were the legacy of the New Deal, Fair Deal, Great Society, and the Civil and Women's Rights movements. In other words, abandoning the very principles and programs that identified the Democratic Party as "democratic."

There was a time before Reagan, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, and the other "masters of deceit," when government was widely regarded by the majority of Americans as "part of the solution," not the cause of the problem. I know that is true, not only from a professional lifetime of studying U.S. history, but also from having  lived in that world for three quarters of a century. From the height of the New Deal through the first half of the 1960s, this country enjoyed its greatest and best distributed prosperity and its most equalizing rights and opportunities--"the greatest good for the greatest number." Most progressives naively believed that we would continue to build upon those seminal improvements. Then came the Vietnam War, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the 1968 election, and all the horrors that followed.

 The "masters of deceit" have managed to subvert that irrevocable truth by their incessant chanting of the glories of the "free market" and reactionary politics. But they have not completely obliterated it. There are many signs of its revival, especially among today's young people, who have come to realize that the highly touted "American Dream" of perpetual upward mobility through the private sector is actually  a "nightmare," manipulated by corporate America and its political lackeys. The worse things get in those two areas,the more  
people will awaken from this "nightmare" and demand real solutions, rather than "hybrids."  



So, I guess that David Brooks and I actually "agree to disagree." At least we agree that "hybrids" in both
health care insurance and voting rights are essentially "cop-outs."  
 

JDB

Why Everyone Prospers Under a Progressive Regime-- Even Its Opponents

Is it possible that absolutely everyone--even those who most vehemently oppose it--fares better under a progressive regime? YES, according to The Political Economy Of Human Happiness: How Voters Choices Determine the Quality of Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) by Benjamin Radcliff, professor of political economy at the University of Notre Dame, who has published extensively in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and Social Forces.

Radcliff's thesis is best summed up on p.178: "Everyone profits from a more generous welfare state, from labor laws that protect workers, and by strong labor unions,whatever their income. The data are consistent in documenting that everyone benefits from politics traditionally favored by the left. The welfare state, labor unions, and political regulation of the economy thus contribute to creating a world that offers the promise of a satisfying life to all." What gives Radcliff's book its considerable credibility is, in a word, DATA!   

The author applies the data, methods, and theories of contemporary social science to the question of how political outcomes in democratic societies determine the quality of life. He contends that individual contentment is a product of both"inner psychological processes" and the extent to which the basic needs of our human condition are satisfied. He strives to answer the question posed by Albert Einstein (in an article published in Monthly Review in 1949): How should "the structure of society" be changed "in order to make human life as satisfying as possible?" Radcliff "immodestly" aspires to provide an objective answer by "relying upon the same canons of reason and evidence required of any other empirical question amenable to study through social scientific means." To do so, he utilizes "real-world data"garnered from pooled World Values Surveys (1981-2007) of the 34 countries in Western Europe, North  America, and the Pacific that make up the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).        


Radcliff is at great pains to assert that he does not regard the "free market," per se, as evil or as "the enemy." In fact, he argues that the impulses toward a market economy and political democracy rose in tandem during the late 18th century as complementary means of producing "the greatest happiness to the greatest number." Even with all of its obvious failings, he still considers the free market as "one of humanity's signature accomplishments." He rejects any attempt to replace the market with some form of collectivism or demand economy, and wholeheartedly agrees with Einstein that the only viable system is some form of democratic socialism or social democracy, such as is currently practiced by nearly all nations of the OECD. The author quotes philosopher Robert Heilbroner, who contends that the market has become "society's organizing principle" which "profoundly influences all aspects of the social formation, whether these are concerned with material life, justice,order, or custom and belief." Radcliff's basic objection to a completely unregulated economy is that "its costs manifest themselves in a currency more valuable than money"-- in the "degree to which people actually enjoy being alive." It eventually results in the "commodification" of everyone and everybody. Consequently, it is the "internal dynamics" between a market economy and democracy that hold "the key to understanding how human happiness is produced and developed" and that constitutes "the arena in which to understand human happiness." Any attempt to answer Einstein's query "must, of necessity,embody some particular strategy for using the market as a means toward that goal." Radcliff  is convinced that"we are now in a position to discover an empirical answer," because we possess the data and tools previous societies lacked", the tools necessary "to apply rigorous social scientific methods." His book, therefore, is "dedicated to applying the data, methods, and theories of contemporary social science to the question of how political outcomes in a democracy determine the quality of life."               



Chapter One examines the historical and philosophical origins of the enduring conflict between competing prescriptions for improving the quality of human life: the emergence of the market economy and its resultant divisions into classes, on the one hand, and the advent of liberal democracy, on the other. Chapter Two develops a conceptual model in which workers can be protected from the "natural indifference" of the market and the commodification of the individual, although he candidly acknowledges that such a system may well come at a high cost to economic efficiency. Chapter Three investigates the abstract and theoretical arguments of both "the left" and "the right" concerning which policies best promote human happiness: "the general sovereignty of the market" versus "the principles of justice and equity conventionally associated with New Deal and European Social Democracy." Chapter Four is an introduction to the scientific study of happiness, including its shortcomings, its theoretical approaches to understanding how the economy, society, and polity effect happiness across individuals and countries. It also surveys existing empirical research on the causes and correlates of happiness. Chapter Five utilizes "real world data" aggregated from the World Values Surveys of the OECD over the past two decades to analyze the positive and negative effects that the size and scope of "big government" has on human happiness. In particular, he provides ample evidence that "Big Government" reduces poverty and generally increases living standards for most people, reduces the insecurity inherent in the market system, reduces the social pathologies that accompany poverty and insecurity, and promotes "agency"--the ability of individuals to control their own lives, make free choices, and act independently. It gives dignity and respect to the individual who otherwise might feel like "a powerless cog in the social machine."

Chapter Six uses the same methods and data to examine the positive impact engendered by government regulation of the economy and the influence of labor unions. while Chapter Seven looks at the comparative impact of those policies across the several states of our union. Analyzing Radcliff's tables and charts, especially in Chapter Five, is a daunting task, especially for readers like myself who elected French and German instead of Statistics as requirements for my doctoral program. This is definitely not "Social Science Research for Dummies," but Radcliff has an all-too-rare knack for translating professional jargon into comprehensible English.  In his concluding chapter, Radcliff summarizes his major conclusions" that Big Government is more capable of providing the maximum amount of vital public services, such as education, health care, and transportation; that more regulation is better than less, because a well regulated economic order promotes individual dignity and respect, while an unregulated one spawns anomie and alienation; that everyone profits from a more generous welfare state, labor laws that protect workers, and from strong unions, regardless of income or social status. 

Totally unrelated to Radcliff's book, a panel of economists,psychologists and other social scientists, convened by the National Academy of Sciences, (which provides government with federal statistics and surveys, normally on income, spending, health and housing) have added a few questions on happiness. Panel chair Arthur Stone, a psychologist at SUNY Stony Brook, explains that "You want to know how people are doing. One of the things you may want to do is ask them." Stone argues that economists have a "misery index" that calculates the economic effects of  unemployment and inflation rates, but doesn't ask people how they feel. The panel suggests a series of questions to measure daily well-being, asking how often you smile, laugh, or are in pain. Sample questions range from simple yes or no.(how much time did you spend with your family yesterday?) to a rating scale from 1 to 10:  ("Overall, how satisfied with your life nowadays?) Over the past decade, according to panel member Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution, such questions have been proven to be scientifically valid and can help shape government policy on basic benefits, such as retirement age and pensions, care for the chronically and terminally ill, unemployment and working conditions. The panel cited a study by one of its Nobel Prize-winning members on commuting problems that helped officials decide whether on not to create commuter toll lanes on highways. The U.S. is seriously retarded in this area, says John Helliwell, an economist at Columbia University who co-directs an institute that studies human well-being. Although 87% of Americans--in one of the very few surveys focusing exclusively on the U.S.--rated themselves as "very" or "pretty" happy, the country ranked 17th, behind a host of northern European countries,Canada, Israel, and Mexico, in a world happiness report directed by Helliwell.. These nations, he suggests, have apparently discovered that "money is not everything."  Many of the richest countries, including the U.S., did not rank in the top ten of self-reported happiness. According to Graham, "having no money is terrible for everything, but after attaining a "comfortable amount of money," more does not add too much. A study in the journal PLoS One used worldwide surveys and found that people became happier as they made more money, but only to a point--just shy of $36,000 for an adult and $144,000 for a family of four. Once people reached that point, their happiness measurements level off, and even go slightly down. Americans  passed that "bliss point" a few years ago, even though income figures don't show nearly that high a household wealth level. Happiness studies, says Helliwell, "keep reminding you that there is much more to life than income and housing."         

It is a widely accepted cliche that if your only tool is a hammer, you treat everything as a nail. By the same logic, if your only tool is THE MARKET, you see everyone and everything as a COMMODITY to be bought and sold, regardless of the consequences to the individual or society. At the very least, we need to greatly expand our conception of "Cost/Benefit Analysis" to include a wide range of criteria--beyond the purely monetary--that accurately measure the quality of human life.


JOHN D. BUENKER

Governor Grinch Tries to Steal Christmas

Apparently, there is nothing so low that Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin and his cronies would not stoop to it. But trying to deprive children of Christmas presents in order to finance his reelection campaign is beyond despicable! An email recently distributed by Friends of Scott Walker reads as follows: "This year, we are celebrating the Holiday Season with a Black Friday special that is better than any deal found in stores. Donate $5, $10, or $25 to help Governor Walker get reelected and save your children from a future of double-digit tax increases and billion dollar budget deficits. Instead of electronics or toys that will undoubtedly be outdated, broken, or lost by the next Holiday Season, help give your children the gift of a Wisconsin that we can all be proud of." <Source: the editorial page of the Racine Journal Times, December 6, 2013> It was signed by "Taylor Palmisano, Friends of Scott Walker." If her name sounds familiar, Ms. Palmisano is the former deputy campaign finance director, whom Walker threw under the bus because of "demeaning comments towards Hispanics on Twitter." Not that he and his Friends did not agree with her remarks, but they recognized that publishing what they really felt about an ethnic group that the were supposedly trying to lure "under the big tent" of the Republican Party was clearly "counter-productive."

What can I say? For one of those rare times, words fail me, except for those too vulgar or obscene to mention. In a confession of ignorance and arrogance of monumental proportions, they have unintentionally allowed us to see behind the usual curtain of propaganda and lies to reveal who they really are and what they really believe. <Remember that other peek behind the curtain when Romney proclaimed that the 47% of the American people who would vote for President Obama "no matter what" did so because they are "dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that  they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it--that that's an entitlement....These are people who pay no  income tax....[My] job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives"?> 

Make no mistake. This is who Walker, Romney, Ryan, Vos, Priebus and their cronies really are, what they truly feel in their "heart of hearts," what kind of world they want our children and grandchildren to inherit. Depriving children of Christmas gifts in order to aggrandize themselves is a microcosm of their larger program to take from the working and middle classes, in order to give to the already obscenely rich and powerful, to reduce the rest of us to drones in their malevolent dystopia.     

JDB











ld never vote Republican had been bought off by the generous benefits that       

The FICA Fix

The Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) tax is one of the most regressive imaginable! It is also the key to preserving and expanding Social Security for all Americans. One of the most blatant lies of right-wing reactionaries is that Social Security (which they really want to "privatize) is going to bankrupt itself in the foreseeable future, unless we make substantial cuts in benefits, raise the retirement age, or perform some equally drastic operation before the sun goes down. Interestingly enough, they also insist that the cost of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and similar "entitlements" is perhaps the most drastic cause of the catastrophic explosion of federal spending and the crisis over the national debt. (That charge is especially specious because these social programs are not even part of the national budget, but are funded separately as levies under FICA.   The proceeds accrue to the Social Security Trust Fund, which, when supplemented by the revenue projected under the current system, is capable of paying full benefits until 2030, and slightly reduced benefits after that.)

The FICA levy appears as an item, totally separate and apart from the federal and state income taxes, that are deducted from paychecks. It totals 7.65% of our gross income, which is supplemented by another 7.65 % collected from employers. That combined revenue constitutes the Social Security Trust Fund. Of our individual contributions, 6.2% finances the retirement and other benefits subsumed under the Social Security Act, which was created by Congress in 1935. That act has been amended over the years to include survivor, disabled, and other benefits. The remaining 1.45% finances Medicare and Medicaid, which were enacted by Congress in 1965. Self-employed persons pay the full 7.65%, but are allowed to claim one-half of that contribution as business deductions. (It should go without saying that the current system was enacted by Congress after decades of debate and compromise and is not the result of some Utopian Ideal imposed from above by Socialists or other "social engineers.")

The regressive part is that FICA deductions financing Social Security are currently capped at 6.2% of incomes of $133,700 or $8,289.40 The $133,700 is the amount listed on line 37, Adjusted Gross Income  AGI).  That combines income from wages, taxable interest paid to you, state income tax refunds from  previous year, pensions and annuities, Social Security income, and royalties or other stipends. It also includes deductions from self-employment tax and Student Loan payments. The reverse side of the page is where taxpayers list Exemptions and Deductions in order to arrive at Federal Income Tax Owed. Needless to say, it is also the place where lawyers and accountants work their "smoke and mirrors magic," taking advantage of the myriad loopholes that they and their predecessors have inserted to subvert the intent of the progressive income tax: "THE ABILITY TO PAY" and "FROM WHATEVER SOURCE DERIVED."

Every dollar of income over $133,700 on line 37 is "FICA free." <That is not true for the 1.45% that finances Medicare and other forms of health insurance. You may remember that several potential cabinet members in 2009 were "outed" for non-payment of that amount, which they "forgot" to pay for their employees, many of whom were undocumented immigrants. But that is an entirely different "can of worms," deserving it own scrutiny.> So those of us who make less that $133,700 a year <That includes me, and, I suspect, most of you.> pay the full the full tab: 6.2 %, $8,289.40. Those who have incomes of more than $133, 700 also pay 8,289.40 in FICA, but that figure constitutes a much lower percentage of their income.  For those who make $250,000, the rate is 5.2%; for those who make 500,000, it is 2.8%; for those whose income is $1,000,000, the FICA deduction shrinks to .07% of total income. Beyond that threshold, the percentage becomes increasingly infinitesimal. Looked at from another perspective, the amount owed if the 6.2% rate were charged against the entire income of someone making $250,000 would be $15,500; for those making 500,000 it would be $31,000; for those making $1,000,000 a year it would total $62,000. For all of those citizens, the amount owed would be merely "chump change," a minor irritation approximating the annual fee, plus charges, at their country club, or the price of a second luxury car.

Obviously, FICA, as currently constituted, is absolutely regressive. It is manifestly unjust. It clearly contributes significantly to the unconscionable and unsustainable inequality that is destroying our political economy. But exactly how much government revenue does it fail to reach?   How much more could the government actually raise if the $133,700 cap were removed, and every taxpayer contributed the same 6.2% of their AGI?  With my primitive computational skills <my brother, Bob, who has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Princeton inherited nearly all the math genes in our family> I cannot calculate that precise amount, but I can put us in the same ballpark. The total AGI in 2010 was $8,039,779,000 <yes billions>. If that entire amount had been assessed at 6.2%, the total amount of FICA contributions would have been  $498,466.91<on top of what is already in the SS Trust Fund>. That should keep the system running along smoothly for the foreseeable future. The AGI of the richest one percent of taxpayers was $1,517,146,000 <What does that say about the really rich 0.1 %?. You do the math.>. If they had been assessed the full 6.2% FICA tax, they would have paid a total of $9,466,305. The AGI of the top five percent of income receivers was $2,716,199,000. Assessed at 6.2%, that would have yielded $168,404.330. The AGI of the most affluent ten percent was $3,631, 364,000, which would have produced $2,251,445,000 in FICA contributions. (Incidentally, the AGI of that same top ten percent (13,503,349 individuals) was 45.2% of the total. These citizens also paid 70.6% of all income tax, but isn't that the whole idea of a progressive tax? The important number in income is not how much tax you pay, but how much you have leftover after you pay.

According to IRS figures, the "Income Split Point" occurs somewhere in the range between the top ten percent and the top five percent of taxpayers,The AGI threshold for inclusion in the top ten percent is $116,623; the threshold to make the top five percent is $161,579.  That range encompasses $915,615,000 of total income tax paid, and is 11.4% of total AGI and 11.6% of that group's share of income taxes. So $133,700 is somewhere within that range, which means that those closer to the ten percent threshold are assessed the full 6.2% FICA levy, while those closer to the top five percent bracket contribute less. Why the FICA cap is set at $133,700-- smack dab in the middle of that cohort--is something that I have not yet been able to discover. $133,700 is obviously closer--by $17,077--to the ten percent threshold of $116,623 than to the five percent threshold of $161,579, but that doesn't tell us why that particular cap was chosen, let alone how much potential FICA revenue is lost in the process. That figure, of course, is in addition to the more than the ten million dollars already lost by not including the top five percent. 

Of course, the most accurate way to calculate how much additional revenue would go into the Social Security Trust Fund each year if there were no "cap" on the amount levied by FICA. To do that, we would have to know the exact number of people with AGIs in excess of $133,700, and the total amount of their Adjusted Gross Incomes. Even if we could, however, it would do very little to alter the big picture. The easiest, fairest, and most
effective way to augment the SS Trust Fund would be to lift the FICA cap. That would not only eliminate any putative future shortfall, but would also reinforce faith in the Social Security system, to say nothing of the federal government per se. It would obviate, once and for all, proposals to "privatize" pensions and entrust our retirement fortunes to the vagaries of the stock market and the tender mercies of the very people who came perilously close to destroying the economy of the entire world. Nearly every American suffered a horrendous blow to her/his economic well-being, and whose ravages continue to plague us to this very day.

The biggest barrier to an equitable and productive solution to this manufactured panic, of course, is that such a proposal would unite in opposition most of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the nation--the very people who engineered our current economic disaster in the first place. Whatever their intramural differences on other issues, most would clearly regard this as an attack on their collective self-interest <dare one say their collective "selfish-interest"?>. The "one percent" and their minions have been waging "class warfare" on the rest of us for the last three decades. It is way past time to recognize that such a state of war exists and to "take arms" against it, and to use every constitutional means at our disposal to win it.

JDB           

My Most Horrendous Weekend

On November 22, 1963, I was a 26 year-old graduate student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., studying for my comprehensive exams, drafting my doctoral dissertation, and teaching four courses at Prince Georges Community College in nearby Suitland, Maryland. My real job, though, was keeping watch over my gorgeous daughter, Jeanne Marie, who had been born in G.U. Hospital on the previous June 12th, while my wife Lee was teaching middle school in Southeast Washington. We had seen the President and Mrs. Kennedy in person a few times at Sunday mass in Holy Trinity Church, on the G.U. campus. The day of the Wisconsin Democratic Party primary, I was attending early weekday mass at Holy Trinity, as was Mrs. Kennedy. After mass, she lit a votive candle. It must have worked because JFK beat out my favorite candidate--Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota.

On that horrendous November 22, 1963, I was keeping watch over Jeannie, and working on my dissertation. As incredible as it sounds, I had just consulted my dictionary <you know, those bulky volumes that preceded the Internet.>to look up the correct spelling of the word "assassination," because I was writing about the killing of Kentucky Governor William Goebel in 1899. I turned on the TV to catch some of the 1:00 CBS news broadcast, and was stunned to hear that the President had been shot in Dallas.I first yelled out loud that those &&&****
right-wingers had killed the president. Then I knelt down by the living room chair and uttered the Catholic prayer for the dead.  I tried repeatedly to reach Lee at school on one of those old fashioned land lines <remember them?> but I did not know that the city's entire communication and transportation systems had been shut down, for fear that the assassination was the first step in a coup to take over the entire U.S. government. After Lee made it home, I walked over to a nearby shopping center and saw that everyone on the sidewalk was absolutely stunned. Many were completely lost in their own thoughts, while others were deeply engaged in conversation with what had been, up to now, total strangers.

Eventually, I went to P.G.C.C. to teach my evening classes. When I met what was supposed to be my first class, I tried to say something meaningful or comforting, but I was really at a loss for words, for one of the few times in my life, especially in front of a class. We talked a bit about our reactions and feelings, but I finally dismissed my students, as did all of my colleagues. In fact, the entire campus was soon shut down by the administrators. Since we were only a few miles from Andrews Air Force Base, where the plane carrying the President's body, Mrs. Kennedy, and the newly sworn President LBJ was about to land, we drove out in that direction. Needless to say, we were not able to get anywhere near it because of the tight security, so I went home to spend most of the rest of the weekend glued to the TV in an almost catatonic state, barely pausing to eat or sleep. On Saturday night, we went to the Capitol where the President was lying in state, but we were warned by a policeman that it would be at least an eight-hour wait--even to get into the building. The end of the line formed in front of the Capitol and extended, six or eight across, for the 17 blocks south to the Anacostia River and back to the Capitol. The mood was somber and subdued, with most people carrying on quiet conversations among themselves. Many of them were previously unknown to one another, united only by shared grief and disbelief. It was a cold night and we had Jeannie in tow, so we decided to go home and watch events on TV. The next morning, we were stunned again by witnessing Jack Ruby shoot Oswald on live TV, an event that lent an even more surreal atmosphere to an already unimaginable turn of events. On Monday, we decided to watch the funeral procession that ended at Arlington National Cemetery across the 14th Street Bridge on TV, rather than fight the multitudes lined up along the processional route. We probably would have joined them, if it were not for our concern about subjecting Jeannie to that ordeal. To this day, I sometimes still hear the wailing sounds of Chopin's funeral march. It will probably never leave my subconscious and still occasionally rises to the conscious level. It was the most devastating weekend of my life and remains so, even with all the horrors that have occurred with such depressing regularity ever since.

JDB        

Back to the 19th Century. Or is it the 18th?

One of the most thoughtful and provocative articles I have read recently is "The Return of the 19th Century" by gjohnsit in the September 30th edition of the Daily Kos.  Although I have often insisted that the right-wing reactionaries and their multi-billionaire masters are "trying to repeal the 20th century," I did not really make an effort to flesh out the situation in detail. So I really was excited to read his "list of trends which show the 21st century is going to look a lot more like the 19th century than the 20th century."

First on his list is the decline of organized labor and the middle working class, which it helped foster from the 1930s to the 1960s. By 2012, labor union membership had shrunk to 11.8% of the total workforce and 6.6% of the private sector--you have to go all the way back to 1900 to find "such a small union fingerprint in the private sector." At its height in 1979, union membership hit 21million, 35% of the total workforce. Today it stands as 16.4 million members, 12.4% of the workforce. Of that number, 8.4 million are in public service unions, which have been growing even as private sector union membership has declined to 6.6 million. <Small wonder that public sector unions have become primary targets for right wing reactionaries like Wisconsin's Scott Walker and John Kasich of Ohio.> Union workers receive 10-30% more than their unorganized counterparts. "Strong unions have helped to reduce inequality," according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, "whereas weaker unions have made it easier for CEOs, sometimes working with market forces that they have helped shape, to increase it."      
 
Although globalism, mechanization, outsourcing, and the escalating demand for well-educated and highly skilled workers have all contributed to this decline, the major driving force has been the systematic "war on unionization" waged by corporations and their political stooges during the past 40 years. That, in turn, has been a major cause of his second trend: the growing inequality in wealth and income, as more and more of the gains from the dramatic increase in worker productivity have gone to the already super-rich, a growing disparity not seen since the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons.Indeed, the author asserts that "American income inequality may be more severe today than it was way back in 1774--even if you factor in slavery."

The statistical evidence is too widely known to require rehearsal here, but the frustrating thing is that it has, so far at least, failed to result in the groundswell of popular demands for redress that energized the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the 1960s. The same is true for the spread of "concentration of control" (better known as the proliferation of monopolies and oligopolies) in just about every major industry--what our Progressive forebears called "trusts" and which was the overriding issue in the milestone election of 1912 between Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, between "government regulation" and "trust busting." Neither remedy proved efficacious in the long run, and the argument between "regulation" and "anti-trust" is still unresolved, but at least the people of 1912 understood that unchecked monopolies and oligopolies were the greatest economic threat to their well being.                 

Perhaps even more troubling, "it appears that the lessons in humanity that people learned 150 years ago have been forgotten, as prisons have become the "new asylums" for the mentally disturbed. "In every city and state I have visited," gjohnsit quotes Estaban Gonzaldez, president of the American Jail Association, an organization for jail employees, "the jails have become the de facto mental institutions." The country's three biggest jail systems--Cook County, Illinois, Los Angeles County, and New York City--have 11,000 prisoners under treatment on any given day, while the three largest state-run mental hospitals have a combined 4,000 beds. The nation is "warehousing" the mentally ill just as it did 150 years ago, except that today they are stored in prisons. Since 1950, a third of all the psychiatric hospitals have closed and others have cut patient capacity, leaving the prison system as the default institution. As Douglas A. Blackmon has graphically detailed in Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War I, thousands of "freed" slaves were incarcerated under the "Convict Leasing System," that sentenced them to work for private companies, our of prison, during the day, and returned them to their cells at night. The system was characterized by neglect, brutality, abuse, and official corruption; prisoners rarely survived for as long as ten years. To replenish the supply, state legislatures, especially in the South, greatly increased the sentences for relatively minor offenses and invented new ones. By far the largest number of convicts were Freedmen. Abolishing the convict lease system was one of the signal achievements of the Progressive Era in several Southern states, pushed by a coalition of organized labor, Social Gospel adherents, and humanitarian organizations. But, due largely to the decline of those institutions, it has been revived in the guise of the private prison industry. The U.S. has increasingly become "a nation of prisons," with an incarceration rate per capita 50% higher than Russia's and 320% more than China's. According to the Pew Center on the States, African Americans are six times more likely than whites to be imprisoned, and non-white Latinos three times as likely. An astounding 11% of black men between the ages of 20 to 34 are behind bars. This despite the fact that housing inmates costs between $20,000 to 30,000 a year--far more than education and social services. At least five states, according to the Pew Center, "spend more on corrections than higher education." Not surprisingly, "budget hawks" rarely lists prison expenditures as one of the major causes of "runaway spending" and budget deficits.

Although not so covert racism and media-inspired fear account for much of this situation, the burgeoning profits realized by private prison companies are one of the driving forces. Many such corporations, according to the Pew Center report, "insist that states embed "occupancy guarantees" into their contracts with with the public sector."   At least 65% of all private prison contracts have such; Arizona tops the list with 100%. If the states fail to meet their obligations in this area, guess who picks up the tab? There are 220,000 people in private prisons, one out of every ten inmates. In 2010, two such companies realized $3 billion dollars in profits. It is one of our country's "growth industries" and its investors are on Wall Street. Two judges have been convicted of taking bribes in the amount of $2.6 billion. The U.S. "prison industry" produces 100% of all military helmets, uniforms, belts and shoulder belts, vests, ID cards, shirts, pants, tents, backpacks and flacks. It also makes 98% of installation tools, 46% of bulletproof vests, 36% of home appliances, 30% of headphones, microphones, megaphones, and 21% of office furniture and aircraft and medical equipment.    

Although the federal government and most states abolished debtor's prisons as early as the 1830s, but a third of the states allow courts to throw impoverished people in prison for failure to pay even minor fines. Some states also apply "poverty penalties," including late fees, payment plan fees, and interest when people are unable to pay all of their debts at once, according to New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. Alabama, for instance, charges a 30% collection fee, while Florida allows private debt collectors to add a 40% surcharge on the original debt. Some Florida counties also have "collection courts," where debtors can be jailed without recourse to a public defender.

The combination of the religious right's War on Science and the gutting of government expenditures on public health have led to a resurgence of such diseases as whooping cough, mumps, rubella, polio, and tuberculosis, which had been eradicated decades ago. Much of this is due to the surge in the number of children unvaccinated because their parents claim exemptions for religious or philosophical reasons. In Massachusetts, where the educational level is far above the national average, nearly 1,200 children were allowed to enter kindergarten without immunization, nearly double the total a decade ago. As many as 4,000,000 Americans are infected with measles; 400 to 500 died.

A century after the monumental debate of 1912, we placidly accept or ignore the constant celebration of mega-mergers or hostile takeovers that produce monopolies and oligarchies in almost every major economic sector. We acquiesce in businesses that are "too big to fail," when Progressive Era Americans would have regarded them as "too big to exist." Indeed, we dociley agree to bail them out with taxpayer money, when ever they create a crisis that threatens to destroy the world economy. Incredibly, those who profess to worship at the shrine of Adam Smith and the classical, "free enterprise" economists blissfully ignore the fact that their mentors regarded monopolies of any sort as anathema. They are particularly unperturbed that some of the most blatant examples of monopolization occur in mass communications. Of the 1,500 daily newspapers in the country, 99% are the only dailies in their communities. Of the 11,800 cable systems, all but a handful enjoy monopoly control of their markets. Of the 11,000 commercial radio stations, the overwhelming majority dominate programming in their respective markets and follow much the same formats. It should be painfully obvious that they not only make a mockery out of "free enterprise" and "competition," but, even worse, guarantee that listeners are fed a steady drumbeat of whatever propaganda their owners want to propagate.

What this all adds up to, gjohnsit asserts, is "the return of Gilded Age Politics," which was characterized by blatant corruption, excessive influence by corporations, and "neither party distinguishing themselves from the other, especially in areas that involve significant reforms." Anyone seriously dispute that?

JDB