WatchFriday I was faced with the daunting task of clearing numerous building permits on a house that I'm renovating. The stupidity of American bureaucracy (three major pointless code updates since 2009) had me thinking that in another era, I'd almost certainly be a Republican. I went home and cleaned my handguns.
Then this morning I'm reading the news and I remembered why I'm not a Republican. While Democrats are often mislead by special interests, too beholden to liberal fringe groups, and sometimes err on the side of caution for petty causes that don't benefit anyone, Republicans have become the party of slash and burn.
The key here is Republican leaders have no intention of replacing the decimated government with freedom. This is the fundamental error of Tea Partiers and other free-market Republicans. They want to replace the government with an entrenched aristocracy and use corporate power to carry out policy.
Private prisons, private police forces, private schools, private roads, private utilities, private courts, and private money.
Take a look around the country and see how things have changed:
Money
1980
Almost all transactions are by cash or check. People traveling use cashier's checks they acquire for a small nominal fee. Credit cards are almost exclusively used for dining while free store cards predominate for gasoline and department stores.
2012
Almost all transactions are by credit card. Banks take 3% of every single purchase, and to encourage this theft they sometimes kick back 1% to the buyer. (if you have good credit)
Courts
1980
Federal, state, and local courts administer all civil justice and criminal fines.
2012
Nearly all civil litigation with corporations now occurs in kangaroo court mediation sessions and deference to these private courts are now part of almost every contract. These mediators find in favor of the corporation more than 99% of the time. Traffic tickets are now collected by private companies in most cases, and sometimes these same corporations are also in charge of giving tickets for camera infractions.
I've got more examples but everyone knows the way things are going, and before someone shouts "DEMOCRATS ARE TAKING AWAY OUR FREEDOMS!" remember that deregulation and privatization are Republican (and Tea Party) wet dreams. What they need to realize is the result of shrinking government is not freedom, the result of shrinking government is private tyranny.
THIS is why I'm not a Republican. Democrats are flawed, but their faults are crystal clear and they are open to attack because government is transparent. Republicans on the other hand are flawed, but their flaws are quickly hidden by burying them in Haliburton or Blackwater or Robert Mericle.
Who is Robert Mericle? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
Republicans today are the LITERAL carriers of George Orwell's "1984" Big Brother dystopia. They want it, they vote for it, and they are at least half way to achieving it. You can either push is further down that road and help kill off whatever government we have left, or you can try and put government......REAL government that can be controlled, back in charge of the country.
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Patrick says
Patrick you should define fair, for everyone fair is different. With 10% state taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, all the little fees everywhere that add up.... I think here in CA we are way beyond past the fair part of it all to the land of government lala land of tax and spend.
When my wife worked at the city, the city bought pencils (in some crony insider deal) for a $1/pencil, all when just walking down the street to Staples one could buy the same pencils for 10c/each without even having to go bulk. Brought by the same people who buy politicians year after year just so they can increase the size of their pensions.
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47 male
Lafayette, CA
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Sometimes I turn things into an essay without wanting to.
The economy is exactly as large as it needs to be to consume all we produce. If you gut middle class workers, you gut demand and therefore you send our collective standard of living spiraling down the drain. You CANNOT simply trim billions out of our economy without replacing it with something else.
Balancing budgets with huge spending cuts and eventual tax cuts is suicide. You'll be taking money spent at Safeway and replacing it with money sent to the Cayman Islands and Dubai. This is the short answer. There's a reason we're not seeing 1933 conditions and it is almost entirely due to deficit spending by governments. That's the bottom line for me.
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iwog says
Many states out there don't have the taxes we do and are doing fine or better. Washington is doing great, Texas is doing great too. While we have every kind of tax and fee imposed on us.
I think Democrats in charge are running this state into the ground. Public sector was always there to support private sector, that made America great. But in CA it is being turned around where private sector is now being squeezed to support public sector. This is socialism, and it will never work out well.
Sure you might be right that Republicans might not solve these problems, but keeping the same guys in charge will guarantee not to solve the problems. That is why next election I'm voting for a change. Just like I voted to throw Davis out when he started taking too much out of the private sector.
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47 male
Lafayette, CA
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FortWayne says
I do vote Republican in California when it is merited. Davis was corrupt so I voted for Arnie, but Jerry Brown was clearly a conservative Democrat with good ideas so I voted for him.
I'm talking mostly about national politics. California is screwed up financially, but more blame can be assigned to Prop. 13 and the initiative system than liberals.
Are things here too politically correct and liberal? Yes. Are California liberals going to pay judges to send children to prison so a private corporation can make more money? No.
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46 male
Menlo Park, CA
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Your reasoning is correct, but people don't vote for rational reasons. At least the lower-class Republicans don't.
They vote for images, stereotypes, team, and tribe. No reasoning! Reasoning itself is supect -- faith is the only virtue!
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/forget-the-money-follow-the-sacredness/
This is the great insight of the ruling class and the fatal weakness of American democracy. For example, using images and simple spin, it is easy to rename the estate tax to the "death tax" and cut it, even though only the 0.3% wealthiest Americans would ever pay it, and absolutely zero small businessmen and farmers. A pure win for the aristocracy!
Prop 13 was a similar win, where the rallying cry of "Don't kick out grandma" was used to mask the real intention of exempting businesses and landlords from paying property tax.
So to get votes, rational people should co-opt the right wing symbols. You have to plaster huge flags, crosses, soldiers, and white people on your campaign. Let the details be rational, but go all-out insanely Nazi nationalistic with your symbols.
Any graphic artists out there want to help with this?
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Davis, CA
FortWayne says
If people are so worried about Mrs. Grundy, repeal all the the other parts and leave ONLY protection for primary dwelling with no inheritance of tax basis.
Wait, the conservatives aren't opposed to the commercial side of Proposition 13 and it's crony capitalist protection of entrenched industries? Color me surprised!
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47 male
Lafayette, CA
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FortWayne says
Not necessarily. Prop. 13 can be modified to exclude transfers to children and grandchildren and transfers between partnerships and corporations. That would solve most of the problem right there. No one would be forced to move and California would become competitive again for business.
FortWayne says
I've said it before and I'll say it again. "Greedy government unions" is simply code for "people still clinging to a middle class standard of living". We're driving headlong into a two class society, and gutting compensation for government workers......... REAL workers like teachers and firefighters and police officers, will only make the economy worse.
FortWayne says
California has a revenue problem. The state has been charged with doing too much by citizens who have rubber stamped nearly every bond issue ever put on a ballot. The ONLY WAY CALIFORNIANS ARE GOING TO CUT BACK IS TO INCREASE TAXES AND MAKE IT PERSONAL. Electing Republicans to cut the budget would be a disaster because they would likely cut taxes too.
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marcus says
I am fully aware of it. I work for a private engineering firm and bid on California government projects all the time. Most California municipal projects require we pay our people Prevailing Wage. In virtually every category from our engineers to field surveyors, the Prevailing Wage Rate is nearly double the pay and benefits of what we pay our people.
Check out the basic "laborer" classification for SoCal. It's nearly $100,000/year when you include pensions and other benefits. It's a total joke and totally unsustainable.
http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlsr/pwd/Determinations/Southern/SC-023-102-2.pdf
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Menlo Park, CA
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FortWayne says
Seems easy enough to define fair. Fair property taxes are the same percent of property value for everyone.
What's unfair is for one person to pay only 10% of what the person next door in an identical property pays.
It's even less fair that corporations, which do not die, get their tax rate fixed at the time of purchase. With inflation, this means that they will eventually pay about 0%, while the rest of us pay their property taxes for them.
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Lafayette, CA
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FortWayne says
This deserves an entire University to analyze. The complexity of the modern economic arrangement is very complicated, which is why factions quickly form on either side.
To pay anyone anything you've got to take it from someone else.
That's not an argument.
Most rich people don't produce anything. Warren Buffett, sometimes the richest man in the world, has never produced anything. All he does is organize the producers. If you examine it more closely, all he does is organize the organizers of the producers. His value to society is absolutely zero. His big wins, Coca Cola, American Express, etc. would have produced just as much had Warren Buffett never been born.
And it's not just investors who leech the system. A CEO doesn't produce anything either unless he's one of the tiny minority of innovators who have successfully transitioned from producer to exploiter. These people are as rare as hen's teeth and should NEVER be used as examples of the norm. Unfortunately Republicans drink this Kool Aid every day and refer to robber barons as "producers". It's kind of a sick joke.
Anyway back to my main point. Every square inch of farmland in California is owned by someone. So are 100% of the water rights. To eat, you must take something from someone else! However the total number of farm jobs is a tiny fraction of the population of California. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent. The total consumption by farmers of goods and services is also a teeny tiny fraction of a percent.
So what.........millions of us are supposed to starve??
A comprehensive answer would be extremely complicated. The short version is that humans have devised millions of different activities to create demand for the food that farmers don't really need to sell us. This is obvious in a closed system but not so obvious in a huge economy. Suffice to say that we've invented an incredibly huge service economy to distribute overly productive workers and prevent mass starvation.
So what is it you really want? California's budget cut by billions? Demand for food cut by billions? Farms lying fallow because demand disappears? People starving?
That's what happened during the Great Depression. Fiscal responsibility is a mirage. It's a pipe dream that sounds good but translates into a horror movie. The reason taxes keep going up, the reason it seems like more and more of our money is being taxed, is because more and more of us are doing nothing to create wealth.
You've been lied to. The host isn't rich people and the leeches aren't the working poor and the unemployed. The host is the working poor. The mexican farm workers, the mechanics, the home builders, the ditch diggers, the fishermen, the miners, the teachers, the fire fighters, and the roofers.
You and I and most people with money are the leeches. Ayn Rand got it exactly backwards. Atlas isn't the robber barons. Atlas isn't Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett or the investors or the bankers or the trust babies.
Atlas is a poor Mexican picking your food. If every man and woman worth over $100 million disappeared tomorrow, if every last one of them was carried back to heaven, the world would function exactly the same way as it does now.
If every person in the country making minimum wage disappeared tomorrow, the economy would collapse, people would starve, and we'd probably be in a new Dark Age.
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FortWayne says
The problem with prop 13 is that its a law that should have never been enacted in the first place simply because once it was passed, its one of those laws that will probably never get repealed because for those who happened to be around when it was passed, the results have been a windfall for them. Why would an older person seek to repeal something that has so greatly benefited them? Oh- and old people vote too.
What should have happened is that California should have enacted a measure that's similar to most other states: Everyone has to pay progressive taxes up to a certain age then their taxes get either reduced or they don't pay current rates. That way the old folks get protected but the majority of the taxes are in lockstep with current values. This would serve as a sort of safety valve to keep prices from grossly overinflating since any rise in home prices would be counteracted with a rise in taxes, thus an undesired consequence that would make buyers and owners think twice.
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Alameda, CA
iwog says
No need to apologize, awesome rant.
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iwog says
Warren Buffet is the classic rent-seeker in the economy.
Henry George nailed it in his essays on rent-seeking.
Rent does not, in any way, represent any aid or advantage to production. Rent is simply the power to take part of the results of production.
Rent, in short, is the price of monopoly. It arises from individual ownership of the natural elements -- which human exertion can neither produce nor increase.
The wealth produced in every community is divided into two parts by what may be called the rent line -- that is, by the return that labor and capital could obtain from natural opportunities available without rent. Wages and interest are paid from below this line. Everything above it goes to rent.
Warren B has also been thoroughly ripped apart by the blogger FOFOA, here .
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uomo_senza_nome says
To update on old phrase, and make it bi-partisan: Some men are born crony capitalists (GW Bush, Republican), some men achieve crony capitalism (Dick Cheney, Republican, Halliburton multi-millionaire), and some men have crony capitalism thrust upon them (Warren Buffett, Democrat). Buffett didn't start out as a crony capitalist, he inherited money and invested successfully. Then he reached a point at which the economy was in trouble and special opportunities were offered to him, and he said yes. It might have been better if we had all been offered the same opportunity, I suppose in fact we could have bought Berkshire Hathaway shares. The whole Goldman&BofA deals depended on the lemon socialism and crony capitalism of TARP, which got bipartisan support in 2008.
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tatupu70 says
FYI, it was not presented as an argument. it was a question.
tatupu70 says
The science of complex systems doesn't care whether you agree or not.
It is what it is. Whether you accept it or not - doesn't matter a squat.
tatupu70 says
There are lots of evidence to show that the futures market has a linkage to the spot market, if you cared enough to look.
This was the link I posted in that thread:
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2012/02/what-is-spot-price-of-gold-and-silver.html
There's also the GOFO rate that comes from LBMA, which shows when the physical market is stressed.
http://victorthecleaner.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/the-gold-forward-offered-rate-gofo-fever-chart-of-the-lbma/
You are looking for crystal clear explanations in an obscure market. That in and of itself is a contradiction.
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uomo_senza_nome says
Cozy with the state isn't an accusation. I've read several Buffett Biographies and by all accounts he's mostly a recluse. He lives in the same middle class home he's owned for decades and he named his private jet the "Indefensible".
I don't know if he's guilty of insider financial deals and neither do you. Buffett got rich buying Coca Cola, American Express, and Geico shares on the open market when anyone else in the world could do exactly the same thing. Once he accumulated billions in cash, he became the lender of last resort which enabled him to secure very favorable deals.
All this is perfectly legal and one might even say admirable. I'll tell you something else about Warren Buffett. Boards and CEOs fear him because he has a reputation for slashing compensation. He's simply not the crony type.
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iwog says
Correct. "Free market" is code for Crony Capitalism.
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46 male
Menlo Park, CA
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Yes, the estate tax and fair property taxes are the main ways to prevent America from turning into feudal Europe.
In the book "unSpun" by Jackson and Jamieson that I'm reading, page 115 talks about how the American Farm Bureau could not find one single instance of any farm in America that had to be sold to pay estate taxes.
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iwog says
A lot of people want state to cut out the fraud and abuse. Maybe unions need to come to reality that pensions need to be cut and reformed. Instead they are goosed every year with overtime and other pension spiking resulting in a state that will never have enough money to cover the liabilities.
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FW makes shit up.
It's true that when things were booming, unions got some increases that were unwise in hindsight. But they have gotten squat since 2008. DOn't kid yourself. Only decreases in fact.
PEnsion reform probably will have to happen, and may involve both workers and the state putting a little more in to the funds, or at least workers doing so, but it will be fairly easy to fix.
I'm fascinated by the idiots that have no clue what our pensions are. They think it's just some perk paid by the state. No ! It's a percentage of our salary that goes into a fund and is matched by the state. It shows on our check each month as a deduction. For teachers this is in place of social security.
It's just part of the way we are compensated, and it's part of a contract. When teachers pay in to a fund for 30 to 40 years, and you enviously hear about their wonderful pension, you should realize, you could sock money away for 30 or 40 years too.(btw, I came to teaching late and won't be getting any big pension)
They can't just "lower pensions." What would that even mean ?
FW is an echo chamber for the right wing propaganda machine. You should try thinking for yourself FW. You can do it.