Paul Haahr’s Blog

Senator David Vitter, caught in the DC madam brouhaha, said, according to the Washington Post, “This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible. Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife.” Now, I’m not a believer, but how does one know that one has received forgiveness from the almighty? Isn’t there a certain lack of humility in such a statement?

Appropriately for tax season, I recently finished reading David Cay Johnston’s Perfectly Legal. The book describes the current state of the U.S. tax system; the description is of a no-longer progressive, mostly flat system which systematically offers loopholes to the richest while hunting for cheaters among the poorest.

Johnston covers taxes for The New York Times. I’ve read Johnston’s articles for years and I had expected the book to have the Times’s grand, objective style. It doesn’t; it’s an angry, muckraking book about what he rightly sees as an injust transformation. The message of the book, ultimately, is that the tax code is promoting income inequality.

Johnston blames the current situation on the power of the “political donor class,” the rich few who make the bulk of political donations in this country. That’s undoubtedly true, but I think it’s only part of the story. I think that the rise of an anti-tax ideology as the key pillar of the dominant political party in this country — and the attribution of Republican success to the party’s opposition to taxes — has meant that, regardless of how it happened, taxation doesn’t need explicit opposition from the political donor class anymore.

His chapters on the lack of enforcement of the tax code among the rich and the tax-deniers were, I thought, the most interesting and informative. He also goes into great and informative detail Alternative Minimum Tax; the AMT has been discussed a lot, but Johnston makes clear how far from its original purposes it is today.

The book does has flaws. The biggest is probably that it’s very repetitive. On the other hand, for a book on taxes, it’s not in the least dry — this is a book which should make you angry.

The question, of course, is how to do anything about it. As a political donor, it makes me want to give money to candidates who’ll fix the system, even if that runs counter to a narrowly-constructed version of my self-interest. But nobody’s even running on a “collect the taxes we’re owed” or “make the tax system more progressive” ticket — as Johnston points out, people run away from those ideas today. I don’t think the American political mainstream includes the notion that taxes can be done well; ultimately, I don’t think the country can survive that for very long.

I found Noah Feldman’s suggestions for the relationship of church and state to be both unsatisfying and pernicious. The unsatisfying portion is that it is weakly argued and filled with wishful thinking in favor of his own opinion; he picks and chooses bits of history to support his case and argues that a “solution that will work must bind us to the past,” but there’s at least as much history which he cites that either disagrees with his narrative (early public schools that were teaching “sectarian Protestantism in disguise”) or which he says doesn’t approve of (19th century treatment of Catholics generally).

What’s pernicious for me is the strawmen he sets up of “values evangelicals” and “legal secularists.” Since I’m pretty sure Feldman would call me a legal secularist, I object more to that caricature than the other one. However, using his terminology, I think I’m values secularist; that is, I have strong moral values — that I’d describe as “progess,” “fairness,” and “compassion” — which I think should influence politics. (I suspect Antonin Scalia would consider himself, in Feldman’s terms, a legal evangelist.) Feldman leaves no place at the table for a atheist who wants to see moral arguments in politics or a religiously motivated person who wants to read the original meaning of the consitution. The reduction in his argument to these two sides lets him try to split the difference with his proposals, without addressing anything of substance.

Consider, in the context of the public debate over teaching evolution, this statement of Feldman’s:

Secularists who are confident in their views should expect to prevail on the basis of reason; evangelicals who wish to win the argument will discover that their arguments must extend beyond simple invocation of faith.

Like most secularists, I am confident that reason should have prevailed in curriculum disputes; it has not. I am sure there are many advocates of creationism who believe it is based on more than faith. Do Feldman’s proposals — encouraging the inclusion of explicit consideration of sincere religious belief but shutting off state funding of religious activities — really get us closer to any agreement here? I think not; I think they legitimize moving away from reason as a basis for argument and into a nasty, strict majoritarianism.

Sandra Day O’Connor is retiring; thus we will probably get an altered jurisprudence of the establishment clause. Feldman has a new book out which advocates for less state money but more political influence for religion; will the coincidence mean that he gets credit for what is at least half-likely to occur with a Bush appointment to the court?

Kevin Drum says something I wanted to say, but better:

We’re almost exactly where we were four years ago.

Which, really, is an amazing thing. You’d think an event like 9/11 would act as a catalyst that blows apart existing political dynamics and realigns the electorate, but instead it seems to have cemented it into place. Not only are we at the same place we were four years ago, but the divisions are actually more entrenched than ever.

I don’t know who I’m writing this to, but I need to write.

For all the reasons, across all everything I know and have seen, electing George W. Bush is a mistake for the U.S. People have seen him as president for four years and they should know this. But there’s a disconnect between me (along with almost all the people I know) and the 51% of the population that’s voted for George Bush. How do we have such different world views?

While I could find many reasons to vote for Kerry and against Bush, there was really should have been only one issue in this election, national security. I found Kerry exactly right about Iraq: the war was a distraction from the fight against Al Qaeda and, more broadly, terrorism. And given that our most important immediate foreign policy objectives must be nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, I find it much easier to believe that Kerry could do a good job. My understanding is clearly not the majority view.

As I read things right now, it looks as though at most 1-2 states flipped from 2000. That means we’re in an entrenched position, with almost nothing changing. Has the country ever had a repeating, near stalemate in the electoral college before? Perhaps the 1870s and ’80s?

And yet, the popular vote did shift. We saw the millions of new voters go to the polls — nominally a great predictor of Democratic returns — and the balance tip towards Bush. Was this “security moms”? Karl Rove’s missing four million evangelicals? Whatever it is, I am shocked by how unpopular the Democratic ticket was.

Since I’m a democrat (and not just a Democrat) and a strong critic of the electoral college, the popular vote difference is more fundamental to me. Given the outcome of 2000 and my sense that fairness means playing by what the rules are, I do think the Democrats should fight on in the electoral college, at least until the provisionals in Ohio are tallied. But doing so requires an admission that the popular vote went clearly in the other direction and our positions are antithetical to a (narrow) majority of voters.

Perhaps this at least gives hope that both parties are willing to eliminate the electoral college. While a small consolation, it would leave the country’s politicial processes healthier in the long run. But it’s very small consolation right now.

I’m very confident that Kerry, if he pulls off a win, will govern from the center. I’m also confident that Bush, given the chance, will not. And certainly this election would give him no reason to change direction.