Quote, er Insult, of the Day

September 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The quote of the day was from a day back in May but just leaked yesterday – Mitt Romney speaking to people who had ponied up $50,000 for dinner.  Speaking about the 47% of Americans who pay no income tax, Romney said that they are people who

believe that they are victims, who believe the 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. . . . . And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Random thoughts:

1.  Half of the 47% (closer to 46%, but who’s counting) pay no taxes because their income is so low that standard deductions wipe out any income tax liability.  The other half, who have higher incomes, pay no taxes because of “tax expenditures” – special deductions written into the tax code.  Of those people, most are accounted for by elderly tax benefits, credits for children, or credits for the working poor (Earned Income Tax Credit).

The Tax Policy Center (here) provides this pie chart of the people Romney says do not take personal responsibility or care for their own lives.

(Click on the pie for a larger view.)

2.  Romney’s complaint is that because these people pay no income tax, he can’t win their votes by promising to cut their income taxes.  The problem is not that their taxes are too low but that as far as cutting their taxes goes, someone else got there first. 
    And who were those dastards who ruined it for Romney?  Sneaky liberals like Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon (the EITC, signed by Ford, was an outgrowth of Nixon’s idea for a Negative Income Tax) and the big tax cutters Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. 

3.  Not long ago there was speculation that for several years in the recent past, Romney himself was among the 47%.  Romney has denied this, and although he has the evidence to back up what he says,  he refuses to provide that evidence.  In any case, of people making more than $200,000 last year,  72,000 paid no income tax.  Of those, 18,000 made a half million or more.

4.  Romney is wrong about voting.  Seniors favor Romney by 8-10 points. And about one-third of the lowest income group (the white males mostly) will vote for Romney.  I doubt that Romney’s insulting them will change their minds.

The Atlantic (here) posted this map showing the non-paying tax filers.  The ten states with the highest percent of non-payers are red, the lowest blue.

The low-income voters in those Southern states favor the Democrats.  No wonder Republican-controlled governments in so many of those red states are passing laws to keep poor people from voting.

(Note:  the percentages are low – the highest state, Mississippi, has only 49% not paying any tax – because the figures are based on those who filed tax returns. Millions more poor people did not bother to file.  Including them would raise the percentage of income tax non-payers.)

5.  Is it possible these insults will help Romney?  What if it’s like advertising, and people make their choices on the basis of fantasies of who or where they want to be rather than where they actually are now?  If Romney can convince people that Obama is for losers (working drudges and moochers) and Romney is for winners (independent and successful entrepreneurs), he should pick up the votes of wage-and-salary voters who dream of starting their own businesses. 

6.  At the dinner for his wealthy donors, Romney was confirming their view of Obama voters.  The picture was a largely inaccurate stereotype, but it was what the $50,000 crowd already thought and wanted to hear more of.  As others (Ross Douthat at the Times for example) have pointed out, Obama and the Democrats have done the same thing.

Another Year

September 17, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Bloggiversary.  A year ends, a year begins.  For the blog, this will be year 7 - a far cry from 5773, I know, but six years still seems like a long time.  I’m sure there was much to atone for, but that comes later.  Meanwhile, here are ten posts from the past year that I liked.

1.    Nov. 7 Patriotism Goes to the Movies

2.    Nov. 17 Constructing Character

3.    Dec. 5 Economics and Ethos

4.    Jan. 3 Myths That Move Us (and That Bus)

5.    Jan 17 Civil Rights and American Conservatism

6.    March 16 Accidental Banksters

7.    June 2 Blaming the Media I

8.    June 30 Standing Your Ground in the Wild West

9.    July 10 Bitter Tea

10.    August 9 Charting the Climb

Conservative Morality in Benghazi

September 13, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The nice thing about having several principles in your moral toolkit is that you have more ways to justify acts that some other people might find unsupportable – things like torture and assassination.

Jonathan Haidt has become famous for saying that liberals have a narrower set of moral principles than do conservatives.  Liberals base moral judgments on just two principles:

• Harm / Care
• Fairness / Reciprocity

Conservatives consider those but also include

•  Ingroup/ Loyalty
•  Authority/ Respect
•  Purity/ Sanctity

With those principles at the forefront, conservatives eagerly cheered their support for the Bush-Cheney policy of torture. (See my earlier posts here and here.)  Those same principles also seem to underlie the attacks at Benghazi and the support for those attacks.  

First reports from Libya assumed that the killers were motivated by anger over a video that made fun of Mohammed the Prophet. Now it appears the attack was not so spontaneous.

Officials said it was possible that an organized group had either been waiting for an opportunity to exploit like the protests over the video or perhaps even generated the protests as a cover for their attack. [NYT]

Whatever their motivations, the assassins apparently knew that the bloodshed would get popular support, support based on conservative morality. The attack epitomized loyalty to the ingroup (Islam). The video was an act of grave disrespect, so avenging it upheld the authority of the faith.  The video was also violation of rules of purity surrounding the sacred elements of Islam. According to principles in the conservative moral toolkit, avenging the American-made video by killing Americans was a very moral act.

Western observers often characterize the angry Muslims as “medieval.” If Libya and other countries were modern, goes this reasoning, these medieval reactions – the fatwas and the assassinations of cartoonists, homosexuals, rape victims, and others – would be confined to a retrograde fringe.  But the social bases of this morality span a slightly broader period than the dark ages. Conservative morality seems to be an aspect of agricultural society – going back 10-15,000 years. In the hundreds of thousands of years before then, hunter-gatherers placed less emphasis purity, authority, and loyalty. These conservative principles also have a diminished role in “modern,” i.e., industrial, societies of the last 300 years. 

But the overlap of economy and morality is far from perfect.  Even in a thoroughly industrial or even post-industrial society, segments of the population may support torture or the blanket exclusion of outsiders (currently Muslims). As Haidt’s studies – done mostly in the US – show, medieval morality can hang on long after the economic basis of society has changed. 

Loopholes

September 12, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Romney has promised broad tax cuts and a reduction in the deficit.  But the only way you can reduce tax rates for everyone and maintain the same amount of tax coming in is to close tax “loopholes.”  Which is what Romney said he would do.  The only trouble is that when it comes to which loopholes, he’s keeping that a secret.  (When it comes to specifics about taxes, Romney apparently has a don’t-tell policy.)

If Romney wanted to identify a few loopholes, he’d have a very wide choice.  The tax code is huge and complicated, and it is full of tax breaks. The Washington Post recently posted this interactive graphic that allows you to mouse through the mountain of tax expenditures* and see when each was created, how much it costs the government, and whether the money benefits mostly to individuals or to companies. 

Here’s a screen shot.

(Click on the image for a larger, clearer view.  Better yet, go to the WaPo Website.)

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* Some people have a hard time understanding the idea of “tax expenditure” especially at the individual level.  But from the perspective of the bottom line, it should be clear that forgoing money by not collecting a billion dollars in taxes has the same effect on the deficit as spending a billion dollars.