Hooray For Meghan McCain

The Republican Party needs a new direction and a new leader. Meghan McCain is obviously not that person, but I could live with her being a minor figurehead. Especially after she drops this bomb -- her beef with Ann Coulter. She is also an able writer, as here, when she explains why Coulter is poison to the party's long-term health:

I have been a Republican for less than a year. Still, even after losing the election, I find myself more drawn to GOP ideals and wanting to fight for the party’s resurgence. And if figureheads like Ann Coulter are turning me off, then they are definitely turning off other members of my generation as well. She does appeal to the most extreme members of the Republican Party—but they are dying off, becoming less and less relevant to the party structure as a whole. I think most people my age are like me in that we all don’t believe in every single ideal of each party specifically. The GOP should be happy to have any young supporters whatsoever, even if they do digress some from traditional Republican thinking.

Of course, those same red Kool-Aid drinkers who I called on the carpet for behaving exactly like members of a cult towards Rush Limbaugh aren't going to like this any better. Those types can't see past my criticism, and Michael Steele's criticism, of Limbaugh to understand that in reflexively defending him they're letting themselves be played for chumps. Which is exactly how Michael Steele got schooled by the White House.

Ms. McCain has a different soapbox and not the same pressures; she is free to say what she wishes and has no particular constituency to please. The Kool-Aid drinkers will be quick to castigate her (just as such of their number who read this blog will be quick to castigate me for supporting her). But no fan of orthodoxy am I and neither should they be. Call me a RINO if you wish. Call me a liberal if you wish. (See my "FAQ" in the right-hand column for my opinion on your attaching such labels to me.)

The fact of the matter is, playing the "more-conservative-than-thou" game has been a box office bust for several years now and it's high time that politicians in the Republican party realized this. It's about good policy. It's about finding a way to make the government work while keeping it off of peoples' backs. It's about fiscal responsibility -- and finding a way to recover the party's credibility on that issue after Bush the Younger totally blew it. It's about what America's future is going to look like, not pining after some mythical past that never really existed in the first place.

Which is why Meghan McCain's voice is one I welcome to the Republican Reboot debate:

Many say I am not “conservative enough,” which is something that I am proud of. It is no secret that I disagree with many of the old-school Republican ways of thinking. One of the biggest issues from which I seem to drift from the party base is in my support of gay marriage. I am often criticized for previously voting for John Kerry and my support of stem-cell research. For the record, I am also extremely pro-military and a big supporter of the surge and the Iraq war.

I'm with you, Meghan. Although I didn't vote for Kerry, I was totally a Badnarik man in '04.

The thing that the Kool-Aid drinkers don't understand, and because of the rigidity of their brains cannot understand, is that these sorts of disagreements and debates are good for a political party. What, exactly is being a Republican all about anyway? Is it about conformity to a social norm of sexual behavior? Because that's how some Republicans have been acting, and it's never particularly good politically to tell people they can't get laid. Is it about small government? If so, we need to have a reconciliation of the party to that ideal after eight years of the decidedly big-government governing techniques of the immediate past president. Ditto that for fiscal resonsibility. Is it about having a strong, powerful military? I tend to think so, although it seems that many Republicans are more concerned about using overt love of the military as a talisman rather than a guide to policy.

I've been forthright about what I think we ought to be doing and saying. Both in terms of generalized principles (a commitment to Constitutional principles, having a strong military and exercising restraint in its use, free trade and strong dollars, binding ourselves to fiscal responsibilty, and envisioning the government as the guarantor of individual freedoms) and specific kinds of policies that grow out of those principles (see my "Ten Planks" post from just before the election) I've put my ideas out there. And I know I'm not the only one putting ideas like these out there. The young, wealthy and attractive (yet oddly single) Ms. McCain is a voice that at least harmonizes with my own. So does Mark Sanford's. On the blogosphere, Doug Mataconis and Rick Moran are more likely to elicit a "right on" than a "whatchu talkin 'bout" from me.

The social conservatives aren't going to go away, though, and the more libertarian and economic-minded Republicans closer to the camp that I find more comfortable are going to have to find a way to reconcile with them. The alternative is a schism or worse yet, the Democrats co-opting a lot of the types who feel the way I do. I can't imagine that the Democratic Party would be a comfortable fit for me -- yes, I'm pro-choice and pro-same-sex-marriage, but I'm far too much of a military hawk, a great critic of social welfare programs, and very critical of the spendthrift ways the new Administration has shown. And those issues are simply more important to me than the social ones which the Rush Cultists hold near and dear to their hearts, and cannot for the life of them understand why others do not.

Who Watches Watchmen? Shouldn't Be Little Kids!

As intended, over the weekend The Wife and I went to see Watchmen. I'm not going to review it in detail because I was going to like it no matter what, although after having really enjoyed the depth and complexity of the book. Perhaps The Wife will review it herself, in which case you might get a more objective view of the film.

A few notes, though. Technically, it was marvelous; its effects were fantastic and the set-piece images were precisely as the graphic novel visualized them.

Some of the acting was quite good; Jackie Earle Haley (as Rorschach) and Patrick Wilson (as Nite Owl II) delivered complex, emotionally-convincing performances. Other actors like Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan and Malin Ackerman as Silk Spectre II, looked luscious but were not satisfying with their deliveries. (Crudup had a tough job, playing such an emotionally distant figure.)

The makeup on the actor playing President Nixon was a little bit silly. Nixon had a pointy nose, but it wasn't that pointy.

I was midly disappointed at seeing a lot of the deeper layers of the story removed from the movie. But then again, I knew going into it that the movie could not get into that stuff -- the pirate comic mirroring the action of the real story, and getting a better sense for what the older generation of costumed heroes had done any why they had done it -- in any depth if at all. It's a movie, for crying out loud, and even though the producers gave themselves two and a half hours, there was still a lot of story to tell, so some stuff had to be cut. Effectively losing the insight into the older generation of superheroes really did take some of richness out of the story; such portions of the 1940's heroes that survived in the movie were so brief and oblique as to leave viewers like The Wife more confused than interested.

I did approve of some of the other changes they made; for instance, the mechanism of the villian's dastardly end-of-the-world plot changed from the novel in a way that I thought made a good deal more sense, without all that squiddy ickiness.

The script left very little doubt about the ultimate plot. The Wife figured out the whole thing after less than half an hour. There was a bit more mystery in the graphic novel. But the overall plot is actually not the interesting thing about the movie -- the psychological profiles of the characters in action is.

By all means, go see this movie. It's good fun and there is still enough there intellectually to make you think a bit. But unlike some people who were there this weekend, for crying out loud, leave your little kids at home!

The movie is violent. Much of the violence is unglamorized, morally questionable, and brutal, even when it is perpetrated by the heroes of the film. You are aware, pretty much all the time, that the costumed heroes of the film are mentally right on the razor's edge of being outright insane on the one hand and no better than the criminals they are attacking on the other. There is violence against the police. There is violence agianst women. There is a scene of one of the heroes attempting to rape another. There is literal mayhem.

This is not "comic book violence." Particularly when the movie explores the transformation of Rorshach into his "mature" self, it's quite disturbing. While this is entirely true to the spirit of the comic book, I would not want a small child to see this stuff. A teenager, okay. But to the woman who brought her four-year-old son, who started crying during that particular scene, I have to ask, "What did you think was going to be in this movie? The 'R' rating was there for a reason."

Now, in my poll for this week, I asked what people thought should be the appropriate way to handle very violent movies with little kids. There is a significant diversity of opinion here, with many of you thinking that a movie theater should card the parent or guardian of a small kid going in to a violent movie, and many others thinking that this is just plain not the movie theater's job at all. I can see both points of view. But what I can't see is how this sort of thing is appropriate for a little kid at all.

If scenes of a man getting his hands chopped off with a circular saw, a woman getting raped, and people being set on fire isn't enough for you to keep your kids away, then maybe the sex will. The movie will treat you to a scene of a women being pleasured by multiple partners (well, sort of) and a later scene with naked pelvises thrusting together with gasps and moans of pleasure, complete to climax. And of course, since we're talking about people who dress up like superheroes, this is sexualized cosplay, which you'll have to explain to the kid later. And then there's a rather critical element of the story involving the would-be rapist and his victim. Again, it didn't take long for The Wife, who had not read the comic, to quickly penetrate this plot twist, but it would still be a tough pill for an immature child to handle.

Watchmen is a movie for grownups. Its themes are very, very dark; it explores areas of the human soul that are uncomfortable to consider. Its content intrinsically involves the relationship between sexual dysfunction and graphic violence, things that are not appropriate things to be exposing little kids to.

Decline Of Religion In America Much Overhyped

Religious and atheist blogs and websites will have much to twitter about today as the results of the new American Religious Identification Survey is released. This is a telephone survey of a sample size somewhere around fifty-five thousand people, which is well more than is needed for a deep, low margin error. It is published under the aegis of Trinity College of Hartford Connecticut, which apparently has some really goos press agents. The survey has been done twice before, in 1990 and 2001, and it caused a lot of buzz back then, too.

The view you'd get from the headlines: more and more Americans are becoming non-religious. The percentage of poll respondents who identified "none" as their religion rose from 11% to 15.1%, and is now the third-largest of all categories, behind only Catholics (25.1%) and Baptists (15.8%).

The quick, superficial takeaway: "Oh noes, the atheists are gaining and religious folks are losing!" As if religious identification were a game of Parcheesi that is even capable of being won or lost.

The view from within the numbers: Focusing only on changes in percentage, for instance the way USA Today does, ignores the fact that while many denominations have experienced modest declines in percentages of the overall population, they have gained in overall numbers. If you're a churchgoing American, you've probably not noticed a large decline in the numbers of people you see joining you at services every Sunday (or Saturday or even Friday or Wednesday depending on your religion). That's because in raw numbers, there are more bodies in more churches than ever before in American history.

And it's also not fair to say that people who answered "None" when asked what their religion is are necessarily atheists or agnostics. What this suggests to me is that these people do not think about the issue of religion very much. That category of people is still quite small -- subgroups within "None" are "atheists" and "agnostics." Now, those groups have made gains even more remarkable than the headlines -- agnostics rose from .5% to .9% of the overall population, and atheists rose from .4% to .7%. But we're still only talking about a very small minority here.

That's not to say that the social scientists who actually took and published the survey ignored the issue of population expansion. Far from it. And that's probably where the real action is -- explaining the combination of population growth with shifts in overall religious identification. They did that, but that's not where the publicity is resting for some reason. They point out that "none" was the biggest beneficiary from population grown, accounting for more than a third of new entrants into the universe being sampled since the first survey, taken nearly a generation ago.

Now, even this is an incomplete picture. Population expansion comes from a few sources -- births offsetting deaths and immigration being the two largest. Considering only birth-to-death ratio, the USA is growing at the rate of 1.71 people per 1,000 every year. This is greater than replacement rate, but only barely. The rest is coming from immigration. It strikes me as unlikely that nearly four in ten immigrants to the US over the past nineteen years have been irreligious people. One of the principal reasons people immigrate to the US is to gain a degree of religious freedom that they do not enjoy in their native lands.

So this suggests to me that the growth in people who do not self-identify with a religious group is happening from people who were born here and who formerly did identify with religious groups. In other words, the number of people who have abandoned their religious is growing, at a rate I cannot determine with the ARIS statistics, but in proportions large enough to account for a growth of four and a half million people in the last seven years. This makes intuitive sense to me. But then again, it would.

Now, there's something else that jumps out at me. The ARIS survey lists the overall universe size at 228 million. But that's not even close -- 306 million is the real number. The discrepancy came from the fact that the universe the survey measures is adult Americans, not Americans overall. This means that there are 78 million Americans under the age of 18, just a little bit more than one-quarter of the overall population.


Those children are being raised, in overwhelming numbers, by at least one parent and their parents are, to varying degrees, passing along their religious preferences to their children. Certainly there are lots of stories out there about children choosing different religious paths than their parents. But these stories are exceptional and full of conflict precisely because they are out of the norm. Most parents succeed in transmitting their religious beliefs to their children -- often even when they intentionally set out to not do so.

So the piece of the puzzle, the one that lets us use these numbers to see what is in store for us, is what percentage of children are growing up in religious households? My suspicion is that religious people tend to have larger families. Their churches provide support networks, many of the religions prohibit the use of contraceptives or other family planning techniques, and I seem to recall seeing some demographics that support the conclusion from elsewhere but I've no time to look them up at the moment.

The question, then, is whether irreligion is at some kind of a generational high-water mark right now. The answer to that question depends on why it is that this significant number of people are choosing to abandon their religions. That is not something that the survey answers, and to get a really good understanding, requires both quantitative as well as qualitative data.

A Promising Sign From A Bland Review

The Gray Lady reviewer didn't really like Watchmen, but it said this about the movie:

the ideal viewer -- or reviewer, as the case may be -- of the "Watchmen" movie would probably be a mid-'80's college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roomate.

Which, with some minor variances, is me.

The description demonstrates that the reviewer for the Gray Lady was not any such thing. If he were, he would have remembered that in the mid-eighties, we college sophomores had extensive collections of cassette tapes, not records.

And I was a college sophomore in what would probably be called the late eighties rather than the mid-eighties (when does the "mid" period of a decade begin and end, anyway?). But the difference between mid-eighties and late-eighties for purposes of cultural appreciation of Watchmen is minimal; when I read what my comic-book nerd roommate had left laying around, there was still a Soviet Union and every possible threat of nuclear war. And no Dr. Manhattan to rescue us if there was one.

Well, I'm looking forward to the movie Saturday morning even if the reviews are lukewarm.

Debunking Myths About Middle Class Taxes

A quick bit of armchair fiddling around gives me this experiment: Let's take a taxpayer who makes $60,000 a year in taxable income in 2009, and normalize that for the various years I looked at earlier. I'm assuming that this number is after all of the applicable deductions, exemptions, and other tricks of computing taxable income have been applied.

Remember, the real trick to individual taxes is not the marginal rates on taxable income, it is the method used to calculate taxable income. If you have a taxable income of $60,000, that implies a gross income of $80,000 or more (in today's dollars), so this is a reasonably comfortable person. Or perhaps more likely, set of people.

What I was curious about was comparing the actual tax such a person would pay with their actual taxable income. That would be the effective non-marginal tax rate, because it would amalgamate the taxes paid at the lower income brackets up through the top bracket. What I found sort of debunks several myths we have floating around our political consciousness concerning taxes, who raised them, who cut them, and how much good it did. Not all years are included because the bracketing did not change every year. Here are the results:

Year	Taxable Income	Value in 2009 Dollars	Actual Tax Paid	Non-Marginal Tax Rate
1945	$5,115	$60,000	$1,283	25.08%
1946	$5,540	$60,000	$1,178	21.27%
1948	$6,849	$60,000	$1,216	17.75%
1950	$6,849	$60,000	$1,266	18.49%
1951	$7,389	$60,000	$1,575	21.32%
1952	$7,529	$60,000	$1,756	23.32%
1954	$7,643	$60,000	$1,602	20.95%
1958	$8,212	$60,000	$1,735	21.13%
1964	$8,811	$60,000	$1,670	18.96%
1965	$8,955	$60,000	$1,590	17.76%
1968	$9,885	$60,000	$1,907	19.30%
1969	$10,435	$60,000	$2,078	19.92%
1970	$11,029	$60,000	$2,090	18.95%
1971	$11,516	$60,000	$2,181	18.94%
1979	$20,619	$60,000	$3,273	15.87%
1981	$25,862	$60,000	$3,232	12.50%
1982	$27,397	$60,000	$2,937	10.72%
1983	$28,302	$60,000	$2,644	9.34%
1984	$29,557	$60,000	$2,497	8.45%
1985	$30,612	$60,000	$2,598	8.49%
1986	$31,088	$60,000	$2,695	8.67%
1987	$32,258	$60,000	$5,272	16.34%
1988	$33,708	$60,000	$5,571	16.53%
1989	$35,294	$60,000	$5,859	16.60%
1990	$37,037	$60,000	$6,152	16.61%
1991	$38,710	$60,000	$6,419	16.58%
1992	$40,000	$60,000	$6,546	16.37%
1993	$41,096	$60,000	$6,710	16.33%
1994	$42,254	$60,000	$6,891	16.31%
1995	$43,165	$60,000	$7,016	16.25%
1996	$44,444	$60,000	$7,231	16.27%
1997	$45,455	$60,000	$7,371	16.22%
1998	$46,154	$60,000	$7,418	16.07%
1999	$47,244	$60,000	$7,632	16.15%
2000	$48,780	$60,000	$7,958	16.31%
2001	$50,420	$60,000	$8,216	16.29%
2002	$51,282	$60,000	$7,092	13.83%
2003	$52,174	$60,000	$7,126	13.66%
2004	$53,571	$60,000	$7,321	13.67%
2005	$55,556	$60,000	$7,603	13.69%
2006	$57,143	$60,000	$7,816	13.68%
2007	$58,824	$60,000	$8,041	13.67%
2008	$61,224	$60,000	$8,381	13.69%
2009 (proj.)	$60,000	$60,000	$8,165	13.61%

Taxes on taxpayers with the equvialent of a present-day taxable income of $60,000 have been at more or less constant levels, fluxuating around 19-20% for most of the postwar years. Then, in the mid-1980's, they dipped low for about five years, then came back to about 16.5%, and took a modest stop down in the early 2000's, like so:

It is incorrect to say that Democrats have never cut taxes -- although their cuts have been modest compared to Reagan's.

Which leads us to the myth that Ronald Reagan cut taxes irresponsibly, and thus inflated the deficit. It's at best half-true. He cut taxes for about five years, but with the passage of COBRA in 1986, he also presided over a hike back up to Carter-like levels.

A similar myth, about George W. Bush cutting taxes in 2001 as part of his post-9/11 budget planning, does seem borne out in reality. Taxes for such a taxpayer fell about 2.5% -- a modest amount, but enough to actually be felt by the typical consumer.

There is also a myth that George H.W. Bush was voted out of office for breaking a campaign pledge not to raise taxes. If you were in this comfortable income bracket, he didn't raise your taxes -- they fell very slightly.

The conservative myth that Democratic administrations impose burdensome taxes on the middle class is incorrect. They may impose burdensome taxes on the very wealthy. But the reasonably well-off have historically not been affected all that much from year to year.

The liberal myth that taxes are, in real dollars, lower than they have ever been is incorrect. Taxes for people like the ones I'm describing reached their lowest point in 1984, under the guidance of Ronald Reagan. Substantial economic growth took place in the mid-1980's.

But them's the facts.

The trick is to keep yourself in the sweet spot of where taxable income is low enough that you're paying a reasonable rate of taxes but still actually living a comfortable lifestyle. The way you pull that trick off is to spend your money in response to the incentives built in to the IRC -- which consists to a large extent of buying a house and keeping current on your mortgage, and to a significant degree, having dependent children.

However, this does seem to support my earlier suspicion that we simply cannot know what effect raising taxes on the comfortable but not wealthy middle class to the kinds of levels imposed on super-high income earners would have. We can't know this one way or the other, because no one has tried to do it in at least three generations. The closest we can get to is the effect of COBRA hitting the economy in 1987, not quite doubling the previously-lowered tax rate for this hypothetical taxpayer. The United States experienced a rise of about 3.3% in GDP in 1987.

All of which gets back to my main point -- changes to individual income tax rates are not likely to affect the economy one way or another. There may be other good reasons to raise taxes or to cut them, but tax policy, at least at the level of individual income taxes, will not have a substantial effect on the economy at all.

We Are All Agnostics About Tax Policy

I want to point out that last night, after considerable analysis of tax tables going back to 1945, I discovered something quite interesting. Individual income tax rates, whether high or low, seem to have little direct correlation with whether the country experiences economic growth or not. At the end of the day, I want all my Readers, of all political stripes, to understand that this is only a little bit useful. It clears the picture up some, but not enough, to pass judgment.

And at the end of the day, passing judgment on something like this is ultimately like passing judgment on varying schools of theology, with the exception that we know for certain that taxation does exist, while the jury is at best out on God. Nevertheless, as I will argue at the end of the post, saying something like "Obama's tax hike is good" or "Obama's tax hike is bad" is ultimately like agreeing or disagreeing with the moral weight of professing adherence to the concept of the Holy Trinity -- there can never be enough information to objectively resolve the question, one way or the other.

Now, In the case of arguing about the existence of God, both believers and non-believers must ultimately concede that the question is one about which ultimate, objective knowledge is impossible; our differences arise from our reaction to this ultimate universal agnosticism. But with regards to taxation, the question is not whether taxes exist at all, but rather whether they cause a drag on the economy. Again, we are all ultimately agnostics on this, too, and this morning I intend to clarify why that is necessarily the case despite having taking a deeper look, last night, into what is really going on with the President's proposal to raise taxes and how people are reacting to it.

One of the more interesting parts of my exercise last night was modernizing the income numbers to present-day dollars to offer a more intuitive feel for what the historical taxes really meant. In so doing, it would appear that people in my income bracket would have been paying more or less the same personal income taxes all along and about the only significant changes in the postwar era are variances in the marginal rates paid by very high-income taxpayers. But I hasten to add that there are two major pieces of the puzzle that I have not looked at closely, one of which I discussed last night.

First, how does personal income translate into taxable income? This, of course, is the issue involved in tax preparation, and navigating the arcane details of the Internal Revenue Code to find ways to reduce one's taxable income and thus avoid higher marginal taxes is the reason why people spend so much money on their accountants, lawyers, and bookkeeping software. It became apparent to me as I confronted more and more modern, and therefore complex, tax regimes that are used to make this critical determination.

Now, given that I have no real ability to decide my own taxable income -- I had to hire a professional to do that for me -- it's going to be extremely difficult for me to get a good feel for what Obama's proposed tinkering around with deductions will be. What I can say with some certainty is that reducing the efficacy of a variety of deductions for higher income-earners, which is part of the Obama tax hike, is probably by far more significant than raising the top marginal tax rate by 4.6%, because it will cause bracket creep and therefore be a stealthier way of raising money from people. This adjustment of deductions and exemptions is what will really govern whether this is a tax hike on middle-class (probably only higher-income middle-class) taxpayers.

Second, there is another piece of the puzzle that I can in theory get a decent blush on, and one which is probably more important to understand than individual income tax rates anyway. What about taxes on wealth generators? With only rare exceptions, someone's salary is not going to make them wealthy. Someone reinvesting their salary into things like real estate, stocks, or small businesses will. Individuals, as a rule, tend to have relatively few employees; corporations tend to have more. So an understanding of how capital gains (individual wealth generation) and corporate and employment taxes have shifted over time is probably more important than individual tax rates.

Seeing as last night's look at individual tax rates represented some fairly exhaustive research, I'm in no mood to tackle these subjects this morning (I have a job of my own, after all). But I hasten to add that my conclusions so far are very incomplete. Here's what I have to say about tax policy at this point, based not on my former prejudices but rather on a look at the available evidence:

1. There does not appear to be any linkage between national economic growth or recession and the individual income tax rates paid by high-income taxpayers.
2. Individual income tax rates for middle- and low-income taxpayers appears to be more or less constant for the past three generations.
3. Bracketing, as accomplished through governmental manipulation of deductions and exemptions, appears to have a more powerful effect on revenue than does adjustment of the marginal tax rates for individual taxpayers, and it is impossible to describe the effects of altering these systems on the "average" taxpayer because there is no such thing as the "average" taxpayer.
4. Corporate and capital gains tax rates are likely going to turn out to have a bigger effect on national economic growth than individual tax rates, and I haven't looked at those in any meaningful way yet.

I'm looking at tax rates, government revenues, and GDP growth, not trying to make anyone feel better about paying higher taxes. I am, however, trying to understand whether individuals and the government are actually dealing with issues of taxation rationally, and my preliminary conclusion is "no" for those individual taxpayers who are threatening to diminish their own productivity to escape slightly higher marginal taxes for higher-end income. I lack sufficient information at this time to either support or oppose the Administration's proposed tax hike.

In a way this analysis confirms part of my earlier bias about tax policy -- there simply aren't enough people in those brackets to matter -- and it refutes part of it, too -- taxing high income earners does not appear to cause a drag on the economy. But this is not the whole picture and I don't know that I possess the skills to see the whole picture at all. But as I make more findings, I shall report them here. The point of the exercise is to look at data as objectively as I can and base my conclusions on real information and not political sloganeering. If that takes me away from the party line, so be it; so far, though, the result is mixed and murky.

The complexity of the system used to calculate taxable income is truly astonishing. It seems likely to me that no one can actually know that system by heart; no individual can actually acquire enough of a handle on the whole thing to have mastered it. Like lawyers, tax professionals probably can get to know significant parts of it well, but that doesn't mean they don't have to do research and look things up before giving advice and acting for their clients. What this means for those of us who are interested in normatively evaluating tax policy is that we are looking into a deeply complex system and basing decisions on assumptions that can never be complete or accurate, and for which there are always subtle and complex variances. In this way, normative evaluation of tax policy is a bit like the Hindu proverb about the three blind men all misidentifying an elephant. It may be that none of us can ever do better than those blind men saying "it's a snake" or "it's a tree" or such.

And without even trying to gather data in a meaningful way, we're really pronouncing judgment on something understood only as a matter of belief rather than as a matter of evidence. So, you may believe the tax code to be such that we can raise taxes on very rich people harmlessly. Or you may believe that doing this will cause a drag on the economy. But either way, both of those beliefs are justified at best by incomplete evidence and in many cases by no evidence at all. So like all matters of differing belief systems, the disputants will inevitably substitute emotion for logic in an effort to prevail.

Thus, the subject is not at all unlike arguments about theology. We all have our individual beliefs, form tribes with other people whose beliefs that are similar to our own, and make alliances and wars (hopefully involving words and not violence) with those whose beliefs are different. We can look at some things that happen objectively, and we can consult complex and arcane texts to support our positions. But the ultimate, complete, and objective evidence is ultimately unknowable.

Meme First, Think Later

Okay, I admit that I'm sometimes guilty of the blogging sin described above. But this time it seems particularly annoying to me. So first, the meme that is being repeated all over the internets; I've traced it back to ABC News, which has this as its lead:

President Barack Obama's tax proposal -- which promises to increase taxes for those families with incomes of $250,000 or more -- has some Americans brainstorming ways to decrease their pay in an attempt to avoid paying higher taxes on every dollar they earn over the quarter million dollar mark.

A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette, La., who asked not to be named, told ABCNews.com that she plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.

"We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00," she said.

"We have to find a way out where we can make just what we need to just under the line so we can benefit from Obama's tax plan," she added. "Why kill yourself working if you're going to give it all away to people who aren't working as hard?"

Amazing! Atlas actually shrugging!

Well, maybe not so much. The lawyer here is not going on "productivity strike" until the government stops stealing all the fruits of her labor, like John Galt and his adherents did in Ayn Rand's preachy and contrived novel. The real-life lawyer is perfectly happy to keep on working and making money, but she doesn't want to pay the higher marginal taxes.

I assume, Reader, that you understand what a "marginal" tax is, in the context of a progressively-structured income tax system. I say that because it's not readily apparent that the high-income tax objectors, who threaten to diminish their own livelihoods for the purpose of starving the government of their taxes, are very clear about that particular concept. With that in mind, I think it is very instructive to look back to history, to see what yesteryear's tax structures were, in order to evaluate whether the tax objector is doing something that makes any kind of sense.

Now, back in the bad old days, there was quite a high marginal tax rate. But while I'm not at all pleased about the tax hikes, I don't see the Obama plan as reaching the levels of the bad old days. So I thought to go to the raw data and decide for myself.

First off, the Obama proposal, according to a decidedly non-liberal source of information, the Wall Street Journal, is "...increasing the top personal income tax rate to 39.6% in 2011 from 35%, while reducing the tax benefit from itemized deductions to 28% for couples who make $250,000." By doing this, the President hopes to generate an additional $118 billion in revenue. (We'll get back to that last sentence towards the end of this post.)

The best source for the historical marginal rates I found here at the Brookings Institution, and I confirmed the peak marginal rates at truthandpolitics.org. I have some idea of the Brookings Institution's political alignment but no feel for truthandpolitics.org, but these are the sorts of data that are not subject to political fudging in their raw form. What we see is that marginal tax rates peaked in 1945.

What I did was to find the marginal rates for 1945, and add in some data of my own. More specifically, I show what the taxpayer's net income would be if the taxpayer topped out each income bracket (not counting state taxes). I used the rates for a married couple filing jointly. All figures are for taxable income, which means all of these figures apply after deductions and exemptions are applied to the gross income. I also included adjustments of the figures to 2009 dollars, using this handy-dandy little tool from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Finally, I rounded off to the nearest whole dollar in all cases. Here, then, is the 1945 data:

1945 Dollars				2009 Dollars
Bottom of Bracket	Top of Bracket	Marginal Rate	Net At Top of Bracket	Bottom of Bracket	Top of Bracket	Net At Top Of Bracket
$0	$2,000	23%	$1,540	$0	$23,460	$18,064
$2,000	$4,000	25%	$3,040	$23,460	$46,921	$35,660
$4,000	$6,000	29%	$4,460	$46,921	$70,381	$52,317
$6,000	$8,000	33%	$5,800	$70,381	$93,841	$68,035
$8,000	$10,000	37%	$7,060	$93,841	$117,302	$82,815
$10,000	$12,000	41%	$8,240	$117,302	$140,762	$96,657
$12,000	$14,000	46%	$9,320	$140,762	$164,222	$109,325
$14,000	$16,000	50%	$10,320	$164,222	$187,683	$121,055
$16,000	$18,000	53%	$11,260	$187,683	$211,143	$132,082
$18,000	$20,000	56%	$12,140	$211,143	$234,603	$142,404
$20,000	$22,000	59%	$12,960	$234,603	$258,064	$152,023
$22,000	$26,000	62%	$14,480	$258,064	$304,984	$169,853
$26,000	$32,000	65%	$16,580	$304,984	$375,365	$194,486
$32,000	$38,000	68%	$18,500	$375,365	$445,746	$217,008
$38,000	$44,000	72%	$20,180	$445,746	$516,127	$236,715
$44,000	$50,000	75%	$21,680	$516,127	$586,508	$254,310
$50,000	$60,000	78%	$23,880	$586,508	$703,810	$280,116
$60,000	$70,000	81%	$25,780	$703,810	$821,112	$302,404
$70,000	$80,000	84%	$27,380	$821,112	$938,413	$321,172
$80,000	$90,000	87%	$28,680	$938,413	$1,055,715	$336,421
$90,000	$100,000	90%	$29,680	$1,055,715	$1,173,017	$348,151
$100,000	$150,000	92%	$33,680	$1,173,017	$1,759,525	$395,072
$150,000	$200,000	93%	$37,180	$1,759,525	$2,346,033	$436,128
over $200,000	use $250,000 for calculation	94%	$40,180	$2,346,033	$2,932,541	$471,318

Note that the very top rate had a caveat, that the total income tax could not exceed 90% of the total income, so at $560,000 ($6,568,893 in 2009 dollars), your marginal rate dropped back to 90%. There were no deductions to speak of in comparison with today's tax code, but even then the complexity of the process of determining taxable income made Judge Learned Hand, one of the smartest lawyers in American history, glaze his eyes over in utter mystification.

Now, this is a big, scary-looking chart with lots of data in it, but the overall picture is of a progressive tax that progresses somewhat steeply and reaches a very high marginal rate of taxation at fairly high levels of income.

Now, you might say that this is not realistic since 1945 was the last year of the war, and of course taxes are going to be higher during the war. Of course, an Obama supporter would be quick to point out that a) we are at war now, and b) the obviously very high marginal tax rates did not stop the wealthiest Americans from working as hard and as long as they could to win the war, and they made quite a bit of money along the way doing it -- a great many of them in the form of serving as government contractors, building airplanes and tanks and guns and stuff. But I'll not opine on this dispute just yet. After all, we have data from peacetime available, too.

1958 was a year of peace for the United States of America. Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the middle of his second term in office. Korea was a memory and Vietnam was still a problem for the French. The Cold War represented an ongoing expenditure of governmental resources, but there was good diplomacy going on too and a three-year test ban was signed during 1958. And perhaps most importantly, 1958 was a year of recession. Here, then, are the marginal tax rates for 1958, following the same format and using the same criteria as I had prepared for 1945:

1958 Dollars				2009 Dollars
Bottom of Bracket	Top of Bracket	Marginal Rate	Net At Top of Bracket	Bottom of Bracket	Top of Bracket	Net At Top Of Bracket
$0	$4,000	20.0%	$3,200	$0	$29,224	$23,379
$4,000	$8,000	22.0%	$6,320	$29,224	$58,448	$46,174
$8,000	$12,000	26.0%	$9,280	$58,448	$87,672	$67,800
$12,000	$16,000	30.0%	$12,080	$87,672	$116,896	$88,256
$16,000	$20,000	34.0%	$14,720	$116,896	$146,120	$107,544
$20,000	$24,000	38.0%	$17,200	$146,120	$175,344	$125,663
$24,000	$28,000	43.0%	$19,480	$175,344	$204,568	$142,321
$28,000	$32,000	47.0%	$21,600	$204,568	$233,792	$157,809
$32,000	$36,000	50.0%	$23,600	$233,792	$263,015	$172,421
$36,000	$40,000	53.0%	$25,480	$263,015	$292,239	$186,156
$40,000	$44,000	56.0%	$27,240	$292,239	$321,463	$199,015
$44,000	$52,000	59.0%	$30,520	$321,463	$379,911	$222,979
$52,000	$64,000	62.0%	$35,080	$379,911	$467,583	$256,294
$64,000	$76,000	65.0%	$39,280	$467,583	$555,255	$286,979
$76,000	$88,000	69.0%	$43,000	$555,255	$642,927	$314,157
$88,000	$100,000	72.0%	$46,360	$642,927	$730,599	$338,705
$100,000	$120,000	75.0%	$51,360	$730,599	$876,718	$375,235
$120,000	$140,000	78.0%	$55,760	$876,718	$1,022,838	$407,382
$140,000	$160,000	81.0%	$59,560	$1,022,838	$1,168,958	$435,144
$160,000	$180,000	84.0%	$62,760	$1,168,958	$1,315,077	$458,524
$180,000	$200,000	87.0%	$65,360	$1,315,077	$1,461,197	$477,519
$200,000	$300,000	89.0%	$76,360	$1,461,197	$2,191,796	$557,885
$300,000	$400,000	90.0%	$86,360	$2,191,796	$2,922,394	$630,945
over $400,000	Use $500,000 for calculation	91.0%	$95,360	$2,922,394	$3,652,993	$696,699

Again, there were no deductions to speak of. Note also that these were the tax rates for 1954 to 1963 -- a period of time embracing war, peace, and war again, a period of time encompassing boom, bust, and boom again, a period of time during which both parties at times held the White House, and for which Democrats gained and kept control of Congress. Now, there had been lower taxes in the early 1950's when Republicans were stronger in Congress and at times controlled it, but especially at the higher income levels, the numbers weren't hugely different from what the Democrats did when they had the power. And the general shape of the progressive tax curve here is similar to that of 1945 -- it curves upward at a reasonably sharp rate, levelling out as it reaches its peak.

So, those were the bad old days from the mid-1940's to the early 1960's. There were ups and downs, but in general, I think it's fair to say that overall, this period of time saw an enormous growth of the American economy. It's hard for me to say that high taxes prevented the economy from growing or rebounding from a recession -- simply put, America kicked major economic butt for a generation despite crushingly high marginal tax rates on the very wealthy. It almost makes you think that, from a big-picture perspective, crushingly high marginal tax rates on the very wealthy don't matter all that much.

Which, of course, it doesn't, because we're not talking about all that many people here -- less than 1% of the total population has ever paid the top rate of income tax in the post-war period.

The next step would be to compare the above rates with the rates put in place by the "Bush Tax Cuts" of 2001 and then to conclude by looking at Obama's proposed new tax structure. But there's an apples-to-apples problem here, though. By the mid-1960's, Congress really got into tinkering around with deductions and exemptions and the difference between gross income and taxable income began to really increase. The prevailing school of thought was to build incentives and disincentives for a variety of economic behaviors to encourage people to, among other things, buy houses, give money to charities, start their own businesses, provide health insurance to their employees and children, and so on.

The result of it is that by now, depending on how many incentives you take advantage of, the average middle-class homeowner can easily knock off nearly twenty cents on the dollar of gross income to these things and seriously depress taxable income. But even if we were to look at deductions, the impact of the deduction on taxable income varies based on the gross income earned by the taxpayer, so even if Andy and Bob have identical $10,000 mortgage interest deductions, if Andy's income is otherwise higher than Bob's, he will receive a different benefit from that deduction than Bob will. So "net income" becomes less and less a figure describing what actual take-home income is and it becomes more and more a construct of tax law.

What's more, taxpayer behavior has become substantially more varegiated by the first decade of the twenty-first century. Plenty of high income earners have been locked out of the home buying market in major urban areas because prices have risen out of sight. There are more self-employed people now than in the 1950's, and they face a hugely different and more complex regime of taxation issues. So, we have to simply accept that we're looking at a "taxable income" that is somewhat more amorphous than what Joe Sixpack was earning in the 40's and 50's.

With that said, here's what things looked like in 2002 for a married couple filing jointly:

2002 Dollars				2009 Dollars
Bottom of Bracket	Top of Bracket	Marginal Rate	Net At Top of Bracket	Bottom of Bracket	Top of Bracket	Net At Top Of Bracket
$0	$12,000	10.0%	$10,800	$0	$14,084	$12,676
$12,000	$46,700	15.0%	$40,295	$14,084	$54,810	$47,293
$46,700	$112,850	27.0%	$88,585	$54,810	$132,448	$103,969
$112,850	$171,950	30.0%	$129,955	$132,448	$201,812	$152,523
$171,950	$307,050	35.0%	$217,770	$201,812	$360,375	$255,589
over $307,050	use $500,000 for calculations	38.6%	$336,241	$360,375	$586,834	$394,635

Now, this looks way different. Again, bear in mind that we simply can't do an apples-to-apples comparison between a modern tax regime and one from the 1940's or 1950's, because of the things discussed in the previous several paragraphs. There is in almost every case going to be substantial untaxed income for every taxpayer on the list; the minimum deduction and exemptions we would see here, for a married couple filing jointly, would be a deduction of $7,850 and an exemption of about $3,000 -- insulating nearly $11,000 in income from any taxation at all. But because we can't know for sure what the "average" taxpayer will do anymore, we're really not looking at the same things as we were above.

All the same, what we can say from this is that taxes were, in historical terms, really low in 2002, all across the board. Whether you were a low income-earner or a high income-earner, you paid appreciably less taxes and took appreciably more money home in 2002 than you would have in 1958. I could, if I really wanted to sink even more time into this post than I already have, do some charts in the middle to show the step-downs in the overall tax rates. Instead, I'll note that historically, both parties can take some credit for this -- the first big step-down took place under President Johnson in the late 1960's, and the second and third big step-downs took place under President Reagan in the 1980's. It's useful to see the top marginal rates graphed out over time:


Now, this is an interesting chart, but as you can tell from the tables I prepared above, looking at the full historical rates, the real action takes place in the middle of the tables, not the top.

So, winding towards my conclusion, let's compare what Obama plans to do with the current prevailing marginal tax rates. Again, because the proposal involves a change in handling deductions as well as taxing income, a true apples-to-apples comparison isn't really possible at this level of analysis. But here we go.

2009 Rates				Oama's Proposed 2011 Rates
Bottom of Bracket	Top of Bracket	Marginal Rate	Net At Top of Bracket	Bottom of Bracket	Top of Bracket	Marginal Rate	Net At Top of Bracket
$0	$16,700	10%	$15,030	$0	$16,700	10.0%	$15,030
$16,700	$67,900	15%	$58,550	$16,700	$67,900	15.0%	$58,550
$67,900	$137,050	25%	$110,413	$67,900	$137,050	25.0%	$110,413
$137,050	$208,850	28%	$162,109	$137,050	$208,850	28.0%	$162,109
$208,850	$372,950	33%	$272,056	$208,850	$372,950	33.0%	$272,056
over $372,950	use $500,000	35%	$354,638	over $372,950	use $500,000	39.6%	$348,794

Obama's proposal to fiddle around with the value of the deduction is not insignificant; by reducing the impact of a donation to a high-bracket taxpayer, this increases taxable income. But it's simply not the sort of thing I can project here without making some assumptions about the taxpayer which may not be true and probably would not apply across the board to most taxpayers. It's also the reason why these tax objectors (remember them?) are aiming at $250,000 in gross income, so as to preserve the full impact of their deductions.

But the overall picture is one that we can see with sufficient clarity to analyze. The marginal tax rates are presently a little bit higher than what Bush had for us in 2002. But not really all that different. And more to the point, it is so similar that it counts in my mind as a "tune-up" and not a major or radical adjustment. What's really going to be interesting will be to see what impact the deduction valuation change will have on specific peoples' taxable incomes -- that may be the real issue here.

That, then, is the conservative misapprehension -- that these are huge and onerous tax increases being discussed. This is both inaccurate and wrong. It is inaccurate because what is really going on is a modest adjustment to the top tax bracket, and a rejiggering of the method of computing taxable income. "Same thing as a tax increase," the conservative in me grouses, and perhaps that's true. But especially when compared to historical tax rates, there isn't really that much to complain about.

That doesn't mean you have to like paying taxes, or like paying higher taxes if this affects you by bumping you up a bracket. But it does mean you ought to bear in mind that you aren't taking home six cents on the dollar that you might have back in 1945.

Now, here's the other thing. Liberals have their own problems with advocating this proposal. The argument in its favor is that this will affect only the ultra-rich, who make up something like .2% of all taxpayers, and they can afford it anyway because, well, they're ultra-rich.

Two problems with this. First, the higher-margin taxpayers pay a huge portion of the overall taxes that are collected. In 2005, the most recent year we can get this sort of data, the "top 1 percent of filers were paying nearly 40 percent of the federal income tax bill, while those in the 2nd to 5th percentile paid another 20 percent."

That means that the idea that we're talking about only one-fifth of one percent of Americans here is quite obviously incorrect -- out of 300,000,000 Americans, .2% would be 600,000 of them. I cannot believe that 600,000 people paid 40% of the Federal government's $2.15 trillion in tax revenues in 2005; that would work out to an average tax bill of $3.6 million for each of these allegedly ultra-rich taxpayers. Any rich person who intended to remain so would look at the prospect of paying $3.6 million in taxes with something akin to the look a prom queen would have at a fresh turd floating in the punchbowl -- and hire a small army of accountants and lawyers to reduce that tax obligation in any way possible.

If President Obama is going to raise $118 billion with this very modest-seeming hike in taxes, he needs to get a lot of taxpayers paying those higher marginal rates. 600,000 taxpayers paying a marginally increased rate of 3.6%, simply cannot raise $118 billion. That means that he's hoping the re-indexing of taxable income is going to create literally millions more top-bracket taxpayers. On paper, we'll all be getting richer, even though our incomes aren't rising, and as a result, we'll be paying higher marginal taxes.

So we're not just talking about a very small number of very rich people. We're talking about people who are at the "made it" end of the economic spectrum. We're probably looking at something like ten million or more people who currently are in the second- or even third-highest tax bracket getting un-deducted up into higher brackets, and that's how revenues will increase. This is some clever and interesting legislative legerdemain indeed -- and here I thought Obama had been kind of a lightweight in the Senate.

All of which begs the question -- if this comes to pass, is it worth it to artificially depress your income by reducing your productivity? Frankly, I think not. The highest marginal tax rate here still leaves you a bit more than sixty cents on the dollar (assuming your state does not tax it further, as mine will). I can see, looking back on the historical tax tables, how someone who is making nearly three million dollars a year (in today's money) might say, "You know what? Spending another day at my office and not with my family is only going to earn me 9% of what I'd be paid to do it. I already made three million bucks this year. So 'F' it, I'm just gonna take the next month off without pay." That makes sense to me.

What doesn't make sense to me is you take that same wage-earner who has brought home three million bucks in one calendar year already, and you expect me to believe that this person would be happy to bust his nut every day to make even more than that as long as his tax rate on his earning above the three million is only 35%. For 65 cents on the dollar, he's going to skip Christmas with his kids. But if you reduce that by increasing his marginal taxes to 39.6%, now, he's only bringing home 60 cents on the dollar, and he'd rather play Santa at that point. I just don't see the significance of that extra nickel of post-tax take-home pay having that powerful an effect, one way or the other, on someone who is already making super-good money.

Which is why I have a hard time believing that Atlas is really going to shrug here. Add to that the inherent difficulty of a small business owner knowing when she has made $249,999 that she can actually take home and the functional impossibility of such a person actually suspending her business. Obama is leaving plenty of room for people in even the highest tax bracket to appreciably increase their cash flow.

None of this is to say that I like the idea of the increased taxes. I don't. What I really don't like is the prospect of getting bracketed up by all of this, which is an effective tax increase. And I really don't like the fact that this will let Obama claim that there are suddenly lots of people making a whole lot of money and that this will create, through smoke and mirrors, the perception that America's income is becoming more polarized, not less. While I recongize that historically, this is still a pretty low tax, it's still money the government is taking from me, and all of the trappings in which the tax will come will, I fear, do more harm than good.


(This post was developed from an idea I originally posted in a comment thread at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, where they are aware of all internet traditions.)

Fantastic End Of Dinner

We Americans are used to sweet desserts. But I think that an after-dinner treat doesn't need to be sweet to be fantastic. And I treated myself to my favorite after-dinner treat tonight. Here are the ingredients:

1 ripe pear, cut into slices
5-6 raw walnuts
1 medium hunk of Parmesano Reggiano cheese (maybe one inch square,preferably cut from near the center of the wheel)
5 oz. good white wine

Separate the cheese into small, irregular pieces by stabbing the cheese from the top down with your knife and twisting it until a fragment of the cheese breaks off. If you're going to be slow and savor it, you might want to treat the pears with a lemon juice solution to keep their meat white and firm. Consume the individual ingredients separately, but allow their tastes to overlap.

Seriously, I'd rather have that for dessert than a chocolate cake.

On Steele v. Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. First and foremost, he is driven by the need for ratings, to attract ears and eyeballs to his show. He has figured out a product that sells, found a very large niche in the media market, and made a whole hell of a lot of money for himself and a lot of other people filling that niche. That niche is the same one whose desires are fulfilled by Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and the rest of that crew -- red meat to the right wing, socially conservative policy pornography. All emotion, no thought necessary. If there happens to be actual content in the stuff they're selling, well, that's great, but entirely beside the point. What matters is that it makes the conservatives in the audience feel good about themselves, and that it makes the liberals outraged. That's what keeps people tuning in. And while Ann Coulter may be able to produce the most outrageous of this kind of product, no one produces it in the kind of quantity that Limbaugh does.

So when RNC Chariman Michael Steele said "Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh — his whole thing is entertainment. He has this incendiary — yes, it's ugly." I figure, well, yeah. That's right. The point is to be incendiary, that's the kind of entertainment that he's selling. Isn't that obvious?

But, so powerful is the attraction of the rank-and-file social conservatives out there that they considered the remark an insult (and "ugly" is indeed that, because it ignores that Limbaugh is often being deliberately provocative) and in the course of about thirty-six hours, they've managed to pressure Steele into backpedaling off of his remarks. Now, he says, "I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

Leadership? Since when was this guy a leader of the Republican party? I've never voted for him for anything; I've never even seen his name on a ballot for anything. Limbaugh even says for himself, "I'm not in charge of the Republican Party, and I don't want to be. I would be embarrassed to say that I'm in charge of the Republican Party in the sad-sack state that it's in. If I were chairman of the Republican Party, given the state that it's in, I would quit." Which is not quite fair to Steele, given that he only just took over the party chairmanship a few weeks ago and is hardly responsible for the miserable state of the GOP.

For that, I blame first and foremost George W. Bush, the man who while the head of the GOP and the President of the United States singlehandedly did more than anyone since Richard M. Nixon to gently hand the Democrats several large cases of ammunition to fire back at us -- rightly criticizing us on fiscal responsibility, promoting and defending torture, giving our allies the high hat, reflexively saying everything is a secret and you're a traitor for even wondering what we're up to with your money and your government, and generally shredding the Constitution.

Limbaugh, with his unmatched high political profile, chose to spend the bulk of the past eight years reflexively defending everything Bush did. Well, with the exception of the immigration bill. Now, if that's entertainment, that's one thing. But if it's policy, it's something else entirely. There was much, much for conservatives to criticize in the Bush Administration. Starting with its advocacy for and creation of the single largest and most expensive expansion in the social welfare program in the history of the United States, climaxing in the creation of an eleven trillion dollar national debt, and concluding with the creation and implementation of a constitutional theory that would leave the President a king in all but name -- as if no Democrat would ever again win the White House. Oh, and lest I forget, the use of polarizing high-risk, same-reward political tactics that were aimed at winning elections by a fraction of a percent rather than reaching out to the middle, leaving a very substantial risk that Democrats would indeed take charge.

Not all Republicans and not even all conservatives were like that. That should be the point Steele needs to be out there making. But so prominent and beloved is Limbaugh that when Steele even hints at any of this, he gets pushed into eating crow, like this: "It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people … want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not."

Well, no, he's not the bogeyman. He's an entertainer, and things he says need to be taken as such. If he says something that makes you think, that's fine. But the whole "dittohead" phenomenon glorifies people abdicating their independent thought and subscribing to a pre-set orthodoxy, joining Limbaugh's amen chorus as if he somehow had all the right answers. Limbaugh himself isn't the problem -- the problem is people who are willing to substitute listening to Limbaugh's show for thinking things through for themselves. This not what any of modern American conservatism's founders, guys like Bill Buckley, Russell Kirk, or Barry Goldwater, would have wanted for their movement, or for America in general.

Nor is this to say that this sort of groupthink is a purely right-wing phenomenon. Lots of it happens on the left side of the aisle, too -- lefties are all supposed to think Barack Obama is the cat's ass right about now, and they're all supposed to be shitting themselves that we're on the precipice of Great Depression II -- but I'm not talking about them right now. They, at least, have the benefit of an actual President leading their party. And if they abandon their capacities for critical thought in favor of blind partisanship (as some of them seem to have done), that's as worthy of withering critique as the Dittoheads are getting here. I keep on hoping that some of them are going to wake up from their post-election drunk and, hung over with the reality that oh, shit, he's just a politician after all, they'll re-adopt a healthy cynicism and start thinking about good policy again. I'm bound to be disappointed in those hopes -- it's just not in their nature.

But this post is about how the top-ranking guy in the Republican Party got backed into eating his words about Rush Limbaugh, giving dangerous credibility to the rather effective criticism of Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that the GOP is really the Limbaugh party.

Now, ever since about November 2, Limbaugh and his acolytes have quite quickly re-discovered the importance of fiscal responsibility by the Federal government, the value of checks and balances on Presidential power, and the need to reach out to people who are skeptical of the government's exercise of power. Who knows, maybe in two years or so they'll once again come to understand why the Courts are important, too. Well, what the hell were you doing six months ago when people like me were saying that the party's candidate needed to make a clean break from the Bush Administration? Spanking off to pictures of Sarah Palin aiming a rifle, that's what.

Come on, Dittohead readers. I challenge you to find me one position Limbaugh has pushed for on his show for any appreciable length of time with which you disagree. I dare you. Tell me, have you ever once said to yourself, "Rush, goddamn it, you're wrong about that and you have been for years!" You won't be able to do this, because you've been indoctrinated into the Cult of Rush, and anyone who dares utter any contrary statement, or level any criticism of Limbaugh, is castigated as somehow not a real conservative. Of if you can think of something, you're probably too scared to admit it in public in a way that your right-wing friends might be able to trace back to you and label you as an apostate.

Which, I suppose, is why I've come to resist having that label attached to me these days. In the meantime, I say Steele was right the first time -- Limbaugh is not a leader of the Republican party, and he ought not to be considered as such. He's an entertainer. He sells entertainment in the form of outrage, not serious policy proposals or political ideas. He's no leader of mine; I take no cues from him. And neither should you. If you want to listen and be entertained, that's fine. If you hear something on his show that makes you start thinking, that's cool, too -- whether you wind up agreeing with Limbaugh or not, that's cool -- as long as you aren't just regurgitating pubilc policy pablum.

If you delegate your responsibility to think to someone else, you're abdicating your citizenship. And, in the end, playing into the hands of your adversaries.

Another Trip Up Geekback Mountain

You know, with only three episodes left, you'd have thought the writers would come up with something more interesting than the Cylon Angstfest. Seriously, that felt as dull and pointless as the black market episode.

Yeah, I can see where it's going to end up -- they're going to have to sacrifice the Galactica in order to find a new home or get peace with the Cylons, and the question is whether Adama goes down with his ship or not -- but this last episode did not contribute to that building sense of dread or any sort of convergence of events leading to a final resolution of affairs. Instead, we got food riots transforming Baltar into a tinpot theocrat, while Adama agonizes over using Cylon goo to keep his ship together long enough to find a habitable planet. Oh, yes, I got the symmetry of both men grieving over losing a child at the end.

I think maybe it's time for the colonials to dispense with the Articles of Colonization completely. They clearly aren't that kind of society any more; the trappings of a liberal, representative, federal democracy seems to be unsuitable for a society of fewer than 40,000 people and extreme scarcity of survival resources. They also need to decide whether they're going to bite the bullet, swallow their years-old anger, and incorporate Cylons into their society or not; it seems the answer would be "no," and that's entirely understandable. But their chances for continuing survival without an effective military would seem to be squat, and with the Galactica about to break up into scrap metal, what choice do they really have?

Bill Maher And Simon Cowell

Today, I went to see Religuous, the anti-religious documentary with Bill Maher. It was a lot like seeing it in the theater because the house we saw it in has a home theater, with a big screen and a sophisticated sound system -- complete with theater seating, which was pretty awesome.

I think a lot of people who give up their religions go through a phase in which a movie like this would have them righteously pumped up. Maher's approach -- finding people who engage in extreme and silly variations of religion, confronting them with piercing questions, and letting the camera capture their bewildered looks -- comes off looking like a bunch of cheap shots. For the most part, these are basically good folks who are not armed with data or quips to protect themselves from humiliation, and they have never given their behavior much deep thought.

On American Idol, when someone shows up to the auditions who has no, none, zero, zilch talent to do what they're doing, they tunelessly croak out mis-remembered words in monotone, uneasily shifting their weight from one motionless foot to another in nothing approximating a rhythm of any kind, they really need to be told that before they embarrass themselves even more. That's when Simon Cowell says something like, "Look. You can't sing. You're really terrible at it. Just give it up, it's never going to happen for you, and go and do something else with your life because you're never going to succeed at this." When they protest and say, "Well, maybe you don't like my singing but I know in my heart I'm really good and sooner or later I'm gonna break in to the big time," Cowell says back, "Okay, listen carefully. Your singing is physically painful and you need to not do it again when anyone can hear you, even your mother."

It doesn't seem like it to the auditioner at the time, but Cowell is actually doing these people a service. He is forcing them to shed their delusiosn of grandeur and talent. They can move on and do something else with their lives; they can go and form a new dream to chase because there is no way they can really acheive what they dream of. But the "service" is painful to receive, and uneasy for the audience to watch being served up. On the one hand, it's exquistely amusing to watch someone be forced to confront their own shortcomings for the first time. But on the other hand, it's difficult to not have empathy for them, to feel their mental pain and anguish at realizing that something they've treasured and value is really worthless.

That's how most of the interviews in Religuous wind up feeling. It becomes painfully obvious that the deeply religious people that Maher is interviewing have never once given a moment's reflection into exactly how strangely they are behaving. Maher, like Cowell, may well be the first person in their lives to actually confront them about what they are saying, doing, and believing.

Now, to Maher's credit, he does not only lampoon easy targets. Yeah, the guy who tries to invent machines to let Jews use their household appliances on the Sabbath winds up looking awfully foolish when he evades the question, "Aren't you just trying to trick God with His own rules?" But Maher also gets some reasonable-sounding interviews from a reform-minded Catholic priest at the Vatican, and the head of the Vatican Observatory. When believers say they want to pray for him, Maher is genuinely appreciative of the good intentions behind the prayers.

And Maher does not limit his rapier to Christians. He finds a number of Muslims -- in America, Israel, and the Netherlands -- and confronts them about the illogic of their religion and, tellingly, about the violence perpetrated in the name of Islam. Here, rather than being met with the blank and uncomprehending stares of avowed Christians who have no answers to simple-seeming questions, he gets glib denials of things that are obviously true. Here, the documentary editing process becomes most effective -- when a Muslim apologist tells Maher, "No, Islam is about peace; the word Islam means peace," you get about one second of Maher looking back at the guy in astonishment that he just said such a thing, followed by a cut to a video of the explosion of a suicide bomber.

The tactic of simply explaining what religious beliefs are and letting the ridiculousness of them speak for themselves is particualrly effective when Maher takes on Mormonism and Scientology. Because the movie is, from beginning to end, an exercise in avoiding subtlety, he uses of the many cut-sequences in which he is filmed driving or sitting as a passenger in a car, talking to someone off camera to drive the point home -- why should we think that Scientiology is more worthy of ridicule than any other religion?

At times, the movie is genuinely funny. Maher's interview with the Muslim gay bar owners in Amsterdam is priceless. At other times, it threatens to veer off the tracks -- Maher cannot resist making pot jokes while sharing a joint with the head of the Amsertdam Church of Cannabis.

But at other times, and indeed for more of it than the extremely preachy last five minutes, it is heavy-handed and didactic. For those who already are not believers in religion, it becomes repetitive. For those who are firm believers in religion, they simply won't make it through the movie without shutting down mentally and putting up all of their defenses. The use of ridicule as a tool of persuasion strikes me as ultimately counterproductive -- ridicule polarizes rather than convinces. This is the ultimate failure of Religuous: although many of the subjects of the movie may well richly deserve to be mocked, the act of actually mocking them will entrench, rather than soften, the belief of the faithful in their delusions.

Grape Juice Weekend

It's hard to say whether the highlight of the weekend was a visit from my father or the blind-tasting party we threw in his honor. Both were highly enjoyable, and Dad was at the party so that meant not having to choose between spending time with him and our monthly wine event.

The wine party is of more generalized interest, so here's the details of how that works. We took about a half dozen bottles of wine from the cabinet, everything from a Two Buck Chuck to one of the princes of our recent expedition to Santa Maria. I had six bottles picked out. Then Dad announced that his contribution would be a white from New Zealand he'd found, so that meant I had to find a white of my own to add to the mix. Two more guests also brought bottles of their own so that was ten wines total.

For each bottle of wine, take out one brown paper bag. The kind that you use to pack a lunch should be good. Label each bag with a magic marker, picking whatever themes you want. Because my Dad has been involved in aviation, we picked airplane code names like "Hornet," "Raptor," "Phantom," and "Blackbird." Uncork each bottle, cutting away the neck film if that contains any identifying information. Each bottle of wine goes in a randomly-selected paper bag. The end result is that no one knows which wine is in which bag. If you've got a white that needs to stay chilled, put it in a paper bag first, and then put that in a plastic bag to keep it dry, so you can keep the wine in ice water.

Then, everyone samples the wines, and rates them from one to ten. We played a party game for people to try and guess which wine was which, and despite a wide variance in the varietals presented, the best score was 4 out of 10. At our party, we had people with a wide range of wine experience -- my father and I are both reasonably experienced wine enthusiasts, and some of our guests were nearly first-time wine drinkers. This is fine for our purposes; part of the fun is seeing how people with different tastes react to the wines.

Here's the results, with scores normalized to percentage of approval:

Trader Joe's Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, California 2005: 72%
Dubost Tempranillo, San Benito County 2004: 70%
Matua Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, New Zealand 2006: 67%
Leona Valley Winery Petite Verdot, Los Angeles County 2005: 62%
Machiavelli Chianti Classico Riserva, 2001: 53%
Francis Ford Coppola Shiraz, California 2006: 52%
Addamo Vineyards Dolcetto, Santa Barbara County 2005: 50%
Angeles Crest Winery Cabernet Sauvignon, Los Angeles County 2002: 48%
Arthur Earl Pinot Grigio, Santa Barbara County 2006: 45%
Charles Shaw Gamay Beaujolais, France-California blend 2006: 42%

The most fun was seeing how the different wines did. Now, to some extent the test wound up not being entirely fair anyway. Beaujolais is best drunk very young, so we should have found some 2008 Beaujolais rather than two-and-a-half year old stuff. One wonders what a more primed Two Buck Chuck would have done in the blind tasting. And whites are not what Arthur Earl winery does best, and on top of that, Pinot Grigio has such a light taste anyway it might have seemed like grape water. The Coppola Shriaz might need another year or two. But I would have thought that the Chianti would be peaked -- maybe it's past its peak. Certainly the 2002 Cabernet should have been right at its peak, and it pretty much bombed.

Ten wines was, I think, too much. Eight would have been better.

On cost -- the two least expensive wines were on the very top and the very bottom of the list. I picked up that TJ's Cabernet Sauvignon for about ten dollars and I enjoyed it very much, and clearly I wasn't alone. A friend brought the Tempranillo, so I've no idea how much it costs; certainly it has the look of an expensive winery. I'm just finishing it off right now. Most of the rest of these wines are at about the twenty- to thirty-dollar price point. Cost is perhaps a general indicator to the novice consumer of quality, but there is wide margin for error on both ends of the price spectrum -- an inexpensive wine may be quite pleasing, and an expensive one may be not so much.

But the important thing is to do the tasting blind. The paper bags added a humorous touch, but more importantly they deprived us of clues about what we were drinking and forced us to examine just the wine on its own merits.