In an early scene in the John Wayne movie The Cowboys, Wayne’s character, cattleman Will Anderson, has been reduced to hiring schoolboys as hands for a cattle drive (all the adult men young and healthy enough have run off with gold fever). While out training his new charges, Anderson is approached by a group of men led by a man identified in the credits only as Long Hair (played by Bruce Dern, in perhaps the best bad guy performance in all of film history). He approaches Anderson about cattle drive work, but is caught in a lie about past employment, and is rebuffed by Anderson. Long Hair is nonplussed, given Anderson’s obvious lack of options, and admits the truth:
LH: Well, I’ve been caught at it haven’t I? Mr. Anderson, I’m sorry I lied to you...you see, we’re fresh out of jail, and you tell that to people and they just turn a deaf ear on you. Anderson: well, I’m afraid I can’t use you. LH: how do you mean, you can’t use us? Anderson: I mean I won’t use you. LH: you mean you’re going to be like everyone else and not give us a chance to redeem ourselves? Anderson: I don’t hold jail against you, but I hate a liar. LH: well...you’re a hard man, Mr. Anderson. Anderson: It’s a hard life. In the movie, of course, Dern’s character actually is a bad guy. But Anderson’s admission that it is the character flaw of lying he cannot abide, and not the fact that the state found Watts and his men guilty of crimes, comes across as a quintessentially American way of seeing things; students of our history can attest that, at least in the American West, as often as not the difference between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ was just a matter of timing. We have come a long way in our views on crime, criminals, and the way they should be treated by our society. But just because we view current methods and mores as advanced and humane does not make it so. Stories of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of guards are depressingly easy to find: that sort of thing, as reprehensible as it is, has undoubtedly occurred in every prison that has ever existed. More disturbing are the ways in which the desire to be “tough on crime” led to the penal system existing in large part to make money, both in local jails and courthouse and in the prison system itself . That both of those stories are out of New York is illustrative only of the fact that New York is the national media hub: the underlying ways in which the penal system is (or at least has been) run hold true across the country. There is no end to the books and articles on the American justice system, and the need to reform that system. In 2016 both the Republican and Democrat national committees included prison reform in their platforms. The entire original point of the Black Lives Matter movement was drawing attention to the need for criminal justice reform. Why are reforms so slow in coming? One major problem is the reflex, on the part of both politicians and activists, to make reforms a national issue. The number of people within the purview of the federal justice system in a given year is actually relatively small: the vast majority of those incarcerated in America are in state prisons or local jails. The federal government (rightly) has little to no say in how those are run. It sounds nice on the stump for candidates for national office to give lip service to reforms, but it’s also easy. They have no skin in the game. Reforms of both the the justice and penal aspects of the system will only come from the bottom up, not the other way around. Unfortunately, this won’t be easy. The fact is that state and local law enforcement agencies employ over a million people in this country. That’s not even counting the myriad lawyers, clerks, guards, and various other doubtless absolutely necessary personnel required to keep the system functioning in all its ineffectual glory. Just like everything else governments do, this costs money.A whole lot of money, as it turns out. The desire by a swath of the electorate for the government to be both tough on crime and also not require too much additional tax revenue is what leads to things like prisoner book kickback programs and for-profit private prisons. Budgetary concerns also lead to one of the largest problems on the local level: the ludicrous system of fines and fees which traps so many people in a seemingly never ending cycle of court dates. Which leads to the biggest change to the justice system over the last few decades: us. Progressive-era reforms led to both the advent of large prison complexes with rehabilitation as a stated goal, replacing the focus on corporal and labor punishments of the past. It all took on a very clinical facade; prisons staffed with psychiatrists attempting to analyze the crime out of the criminal became the norm. The parole system developed. We decided to fight a war on both crime and drugs, leading to harsher sentences and mandatory minimums. The politicians continued to do what they always do, passing laws to fix things and then promising more fixes for the things the last law screwed up. Somewhere along the line we lost sight of the dehumanizing effect the system can have on people; it’s entirely possible that corporal punishment over a much shorter period of time allows for a retention of dignity that years in a modern cell under constant state supervision does not. Serious and violent crime has to be punished, but it’s difficult to see how the current way we treat other crimes is effective at anything other than creating jobs in the justice and penal systems, which in turn requires tightening the screws just a little more to produce more criminals and fines and fees. There are too many prisoners in this country because there are too many laws in this country, and too many people dependent on the enforcement of those laws. We aren’t Will Anderson anymore. We do hold jail against you. And then we charge you for it.
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There are people who will tell you there is a Seinfeld reference for virtually everything, and I have a hard time arguing with those people. As someone with an unhealthy recall for movie and TV quotes who has seen every episode more than once (don’t ever try and tell me that my stoner phase was unproductive…) I rarely go a day without hearing or seeing something that reminds me of Seinfeld.
Which is why, earlier this week, when a couple of well-meaning Tweeters responded to a tweet about limits on the deductibility of State and Local Taxes (“SALT” - but not the “SALT” that I sometimes refer to on Friday mornings…), I couldn’t help but think of Kramer and his “write-off theory.” The tax bill, I was told, was simply closing a “loophole” in the tax code that made low-tax red states subsidize high-tax blue states. “You don’t even know what a write-off is.” “No, but they do! And they’re the ones writing it off!!!” “Loophole,” of course, has become shorthand for “any tax deduction that benefits another person but not me.” In a broader sense (like the famed “Gun Show Loophole”) it has become shorthand for “any circumstance that doesn’t currently exist in the way I would like it to,” but I am going to limit this to tax code issues. The deductibility of State and Local Taxes is no more a loophole than the mortgage interest, 401K contribution or education expense deductions. In fact, since it is based in the sound Federalist principle that one level of government should not tax another and represents a direct hike in marginal rates (as opposed to removing a distortion), you could argue that it is even less of a loophole than those other, behavior-driving tax incentives. {I wouldn’t, because none of them are actually loopholes at all, and because I have already detailed my wish that we eliminate all of them en masse}. Pretty soon you get to a point where every single deduction is a loophole, which is fine, except for not matching up with the meaning of words. Yes, in the literal sense, the services provided by high-tax states (which, before you call me biased, does not include my current home state of Massachusetts nearly as much as you think) come with reduced revenues to the Treasury. As long as we are being literal, though, we can note that the net impact to the Treasury of all State and Local Tax deductions is less than each of the Earned Income Tax Credit, mortgage interest deduction and either pension or 401K contributions. It’s a fraction of the “cost” of treating capital gains as separate from income, deferring taxes on foreign-controlled corporations or excluding imputed rental income. It is about 25 percent as large of the employer-provided medical insurance “loophole.” The actual “subsidy” flowing from low-tax states to high-tax states (which would be probably 35 percent of the total SALT deduction), in other words, is not a needle-moving figure. I’d also be remiss in noting that two can play this game, my friends. Not only if this a line of thinking that cuts both ways, it in fact cuts the other way even sharper. The disproportionate share of Federal aid received by low-tax states allows them to keep their taxes artificially low. And those payments are full-value cash payments, unlike a SALT deduction, which is worth only a portion equal to the taxpayer’s marginal Federal tax rate. There are some other inconvenient facts for low-tax states that are suddenly convinced they are subsidizing high-tax states to some grossly inequitable degree. While the correlation is far from perfect (Hawaii, Kansas and Nebraska are very obvious outliers), those same low-tax states are beneficiaries of Federal spending disproportionate to the Federal tax they pay. Other than the aforementioned Hawaii (methinks there is a naval base that drives this), the 10 states that receive at least double in Federal spending what they pay in Federal taxes are all low-tax states. How, for example, might Mississippi’s state tax rates look different if more than one in five residents wasn’t receiving Federal SNAP assistance? Who, really, is subsidizing whom? Another imperfect correlation that nevertheless lines up neatly with this debate is that the Federal tax code, which doesn’t adjust for cost of living, is already patently unfair to residents of many of the states that will be hurt by limiting the SALT deduction. A dollar in Seattle is not the same as a dollar in Little Rock, but a person earning the same amount of them in those two places is treated by the tax code as if they are. With a progressive tax code and numerous deductions limited to specific dollar amounts, states with a higher cost of living and proportionately higher wage environments will always pay disproportionately higher Federal taxes. In a more conceptual sense, the glee taken by some low tax states in formulating a tax code change that impacts other people much more than them is a break from a philosophy that many would claim to believe in. Asking that tax collection and spending be moved from the State to the Federal level is an anti-Federalist position from states that generally espouse more state autonomy. Intellectual consistency would call for those states to want their taxes collected locally more than Federally, but I suppose that intellectual consistency has never been a prerequisite for any American tax policy discussion. It is almost as if this is really about Republican senators trying to find as many ways as possible to shift the tax burden from their constituents to those of states with Democratic Senators… The tax code, as I have written before, is a mess. There is no magic to the current rates or deductions, and we should give no deference to the current regime when discussing changes to it. Politically, the biggest problem with the tax code is that it is too complex to even allow for an intellectually honest and rational debate. It is too easy to cherry pick data points and exclude relevant mitigating factors, to speak in half-truths and hide behind the obfuscation of contextualized facts. This includes the ease with which we often dismiss anything we don’t like as a “loophole.” Before we go throwing out intentional, rational and logical portions of the tax code, though, we should try to be honest with ourselves about what we are doing and why we are doing it. Under that lens, SALT is an economically curious but politically very obvious place to start, and we should be naturally dubious of anything that makes more sense politically than economically. Besides, you wouldn’t believe what those people are writing off these days.
Oprah.
Hollywood is a complete ideological ash heap. It always has been, and it always will be. We have only just begun to understand the depths (and width) of the depravity found within the soft, rotted underbelly that is the primary source of the world’s popular culture. And yet, somehow, the Democrats took a speech that essentially condemned Democrats’ treatment of women and turned it into a rallying cry for Oprah to topple….Republicans. Ignore this threat at your peril. I am not saying she will run, and I am not necessarily even saying she would win her own party’s nomination; but I do seem to recall back in 2015 when a billionaire businessman who had started his own companies announced he was going to run for president. He was mocked, laughed at, and to the left’s greatest detriment: dismissed. Do not fall into the greatest political trap one can find, complacency. The reasons that Oprah Winfrey’s candidacy should not be dismissed out of hand lie far beyond the conjecture and abject silliness of it all. By silly, I am referring to the setting of precedent whereby every four years some kind of beloved public figure is thrust into political leadership because people like what they see of them on television. The parallels are actually quite striking.
Beyond these basic, superficial comparisons, there are some reasons within the election data that would make her a far more formidable opponent than people may wish to admit. 1. She’s black. Donald Trump won the presidency by breaking through that infamous “blue wall.” Within that blue wall are three notoriously fickle purple states: Wisconsin (perhaps not so purple anymore), Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Let us first take a glimpse into the bluest of those three states: Michigan. Donald Trump won Michigan by a mere 10,704 votes, a state Barack Obama won by around 400,000 votes. More critically, Hillary Clinton received 300,000 fewer votes than Barack Obama did in 2012. Take it down now to a more narrow view. Wayne County, home to Detroit, produced 75,000 fewer votes for Hillary than they did for Barack Obama. One would only need to see a 13 percent increase in the black vote to secure Wayne County, Michigan, and thus 16 votes away from Trump and to Oprah Winfrey (D) - IL.
288-248
Pennsylvanians voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of just 40,000 votes. If we repeat the above exercise, looking at the city of Philadelphia alone, Hillary Clinton failed to capture 35,000 votes in 2016 that Barack Obama received in 2012. One of the things I learned by watching election night coverage is that if you are doing poorly with one class of voters in one place, then you will do poorly with them in others as well. For example, the Wisconsin vote all but predicted what would happen in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Carry out this same exercise with Pittsburgh, and you have Oprah Winfrey winning Pennsylvania.
268-268
Nervous yet? You should be. If not, apply the same standard for low black voter turnout in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Even more alarming, look at North Carolina.
I am aware and appreciate that elections do not occur in a vacuum. There are factors that would lend, and have lent!, themselves to black voters voting for Donald Trump versus Oprah Winfrey, but I certainly would not bet my campaign on that. 2. She’s a woman Not just any woman, mind you. She’s OPRAH. The woman who dominated daytime television for almost all of the 1990s and beyond. Now think for a moment about the demographic that watched Oprah in the 1990s (twenty-two years ago). The only subset of white voters Trump did not win was white, college-educated women. The battering Hillary took at the hands of white non-college educated women was one of the key stories of the election, losing them 62-34. Now, I do not know what time Oprah came on in most parts of the country, but it came on at 4pm Central Time where I grew up. While I was listening to Rush Limbaugh in my car at lunch, women my age were going home to watch Oprah. For an entire generation, Oprah told women what to wear, what to read, what to drive, how to raise their kids; they revered her on a level bordering on worship. When you are talking about an electoral win that came by the slimmest of margins in three states, you don’t have a lot of white votes you can afford to give away. 3. She’s not Hillary Hillary Clinton could put a meth addict with a full supply of Mountain Dew to sleep; that is not Oprah. She made her fortune captivating and holding audiences. Now, I do have reservations about Oprah’s stamina, and her ability to sustain a campaign over the course of two or three years against a man almost known for his rigor and endless enthusiasm. But she is not Hillary. There is no toilet email server, no mishandled classified documents, no Benghazi, no uranium deal, no Huma, no Anthony Weiner. BUT SHE LOVED HARVEY WEINSTEIN, YOU SHOUT! And my response to that is that her pictures with Weinstein will matter as much to her voters as Trump’s Access Hollywood tapes mattered to his. Besides, there were Democrats, feminists!, who were asking Al Franken to reconsider his resignation (and there were pictures)! I am not advocating for Oprah Winfrey to run for president, and I am certainly not hoping that she would run and then win. What I am warning, however, is not to dismiss her in such a way that would easily be painted as racist, sexist, or ignorant of the power she would potentially wield amongst a wildly swayable electorate. HA! Oprah as president?! What a joke! That’s what the left said about Trump in the summer of 2015. Long live the Republic. |
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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