35 thoughts on “The Nuclear Popgun”

  1. I wonder if things have gotten to such a state that no one is willing to touch this monster, for fear that an enormous disaster is certain and the only question is who is going to be tagged for the responsibility. They may be feeling, on both sides, like the safest position is to weakly support the status quo, or weakly oppose it, and orate passionately about how Something Must Be Done.

    After the 100-foot tsunami washes us all away, the one will be pointing out he had recommended closing the windows, and the other will be shaking his head sorrowfully, reminding us he did suggest inflating the kids’ pool raft.

    The other serious problem I see is that pundits fantasize that the budget can be cut by paring down the degree to which government does certain things, or freezing salaries for a while, or trimming benefits for new hires, or asking Federal employees to contribute $0.06 of each dollar of their health-care benefits.

    No one seems to understand that with a problem this big, tens of thousands of government workers at all levels need to lose their jobs. The government has to withdraw completely from hundreds of areas of activity. Whole departments and agencies need to be closed, the office equipment put on eBay, the building sold.

    These are homeowners looking at a balloon payment six times their monthly take-home pay, on a house for which they owe $100,000 more than its market value, and saying well…maybe we should give up Starbucks on Wednesdays and Fridays. “Delusional” would be a mild term.

  2. No one seems to understand that with a problem this big, tens of thousands of government workers at all levels need to lose their jobs. The government has to withdraw completely from hundreds of areas of activity. Whole departments and agencies need to be closed, the office equipment put on eBay, the building sold.

    Sadly, it is worse than that. It’s not just the government workers on payroll. The problem is the citizens on the payroll. The citizens, who are not employees, who don’t provide anything to the economy, but get a paycheck. Its the programs that pay those people that have automatic pay increases built into them, so they’ll never get smaller. That’s the elephant nobody wants to notice, much less take on.

  3. Is a federal value added tax becoming inevitable? I am not saying that would be a good thing for the American people, just that it is perhaps another way out for the government. Realistically, and perhaps considering a general failure of the Republican Party, is the government more likely to find it easier to reduce spending of increase taxation?

  4. To answer Pete’s question: in 1819, the great State of Louisiana legally recognized the necessity of chaining slaves to prevent escape.

  5. The citizens, who are not employees, who don’t provide anything to the economy, but get a paycheck. Its the programs that pay those people that have automatic pay increases built into them, so they’ll never get smaller. That’s the elephant nobody wants to notice, much less take on.

    This might be workable if the numbers of people were static, or the proportion of people paying vs. people being paid were relatively stable. However, Summer 1945 + 9 months + 65 years ~ Spring 2011: the first of the Baby Boomers are turning 65 right about… now. There is about to be a huge increase increase in the number of citizens being paid, spread out over the next fifteen years or so, peaking around 2018-19.

  6. Yes, that’s a problem, Leland. That comes under my heading “areas the government must exit.” No rational people would design and leave around a massive engine for transferring money by force from one group of people to another, according to the whims of whatever group had it in its power at the moment. This is worse than leaving a loaded pistol in a room full of teenagers smoking dope, or selling compact nuclear weapons to mullahs stuck in the 16th century.

    But, that said, let us keep in mind that Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, defense, and interest account for only 68% of the Federal budget. That leaves a lot of other stuff. And at that, let us notice the clever way the solons usually lump Medicaid (a welfare program) in with Medicare (what pays for granny’s bypass), and disability SS pensions (another welfare program) with old-age SS pensions (what pays for granny’s groceries).

    In fact Medicare alone is about $450 billion of the $793 billion “Medicare/Medicaid” buget category. It’s harder to find the number for what fraction of “Social Security” spending is disability benefits instead of old-age pensions, but a 2005 report (on the alarmingly rapid increase in disability claims) suggests of order 20%, or $140 billon of the $700 billion Social Security spends.

    So if we take only the true “social contract” aspect of spending, i.e. Medicare and Social Security old-age pensions, the things it wold be cruel to granny to touch, and subtracting out the welfare portions of these categories, then adding to them defense spending and interest on the debt we come to $1900 billion or only 55% of Barack’s $3456 billion budget.

    In short, 45% of the Federal budget, or $1.56 trillion, can be whacked without even touching granny’s pension, granny’s Medicare, national defense, or interest on the national debt.

    We are, quite simply, being lied to. It’s not those untouchable social-contract obligations that are preventing any realistic budget cutting. That is simply a “Washington Monument” strategy by the politicians, or a way to (quite unfairly) reflect the blame back at voters. We can severely reduce the size and scope of government — say, come up with $500 billion in cuts — without undoing or even modifying the current idea of a national retirement pension and health-care plan.

  7. Titus,
    they can try to chain us for sure. But you can put a hamster IN the wheel, but you can’t make it run.

    I’m thinking IF we see a VAT on everything, on top of all other taxation, with no HUGE reduction in spending, you’ll see spending go as low as people can get it. I’m not an economists, but that won’t help the economy.

    People will spend on needs, buying wants will go out the window.

  8. It would be great if The Stupid Party would man up and make this happen. But I fear all we will see is another list of RINOs to replace in 2012 – if we still have a Republic.

  9. I’ve always wanted a flat tax of ten percent. Everyone must file an individual return, there are no deductions or credits, and give everyone a 20K poverty level exemption. Someone making 22K per year pays $200, someone making $250K pays $23,000. If the poverty level goes up or down, simply adjust the exemption.

    Heck, simply make this the new AMT and gradually phase out the existing monstrosity over a period of a few years, and convert all the IRS agents into the fraud police for companies that make their living from the Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the veterans assistance programs.

    The one thing I can’t find is a web-based tool that would help me determine how much revenue this method would generate annually. Does anyone have any recommendations?

  10. I forgot to add that of course once the US govt. is put on a serious diet back to the point where they can comfortably wear their constitutional pants we may find that ten percent is too much. Then perhaps we could leave it at that rate until the debt is paid off and adjust the rate down to actual needs.

    I would also lower the corporate tax rate to zero and simply say that corporations can set aside profits up to one year of retained earnings and then must flush the rest of their profits into dividends which would then be captured on individual tax returns at the ten percent rate. I haven’t worked through all the details on the corporate side, but I figure it is a good place to start the debate.

  11. Get rid of programs. Pull out the GSA list and just start slashing. A simple tried and true method is to do it in ABC order. Anything that does not provide a necessary service cut it…period. I don’t care how many jobs are lost. If it meant this government could get back into a managable, accountable state I say just rip it apart and start over. It’s not like this country hasn’t done it before. We will survive and be better off for it, in the long run. I am so sick and tired of people saying “cut everyone else’s and leave mine alone” Be a smart government for once and go for yours and mine too. Do the right thing and bring this government to it’s knees…I have heard that it’s a position worth it’s weight in gold. (the dollar isn’t worth diddley!

  12. Personally I like the idea of a simple flat tax. I suspect complexity leads to inefficiency in this case (even if expert software is used). For example, tax professionals often advertise about how they can cleverly get their clients greater refunds – if they got everyone greater refunds taxes would just be increased to compensate and the net effect would be an added tax to pay for tax professionals – complicated tax becomes a tax payer funded jobs program. Also, tax complexity invariably leads to distortions and unnatural cross subsides.

    I further like the idea of a fixed tax rebate to cover the poor. Give everyone say $5k/year and offset it against their taxes. Perhaps with extra adjustments for children. Then eliminate all welfare payments including social security, disability, medicaid and medicare. This is hopefully a very efficient and low overhead way of providing a general safety net, and it largely gets government fingers out of the pie (minimal government). Index it to GDP and maybe make the proportion subject to referendum if you want to get politician’s fingers completely out of the pie and make it self adjusting to recessions.

    Looking around the world, efficient wealth redistribution (with regard to a safety net) is critical to prosperity, and this is where I think the US particularly fails. If it is not efficient a country is better off without it.

  13. There is an argument to get rid of income tax and replace it with a VAT or consumption tax. It is something of a flat tax and it encourages investment in the future (productivity over consumption). It could also eliminate a lot of tax complexity. I see issues with enforcement though, especially over state and international borders.

    Something that has been bothering me of late is this idea that the US needs to start consuming again for economic growth. In my mind it needs to increase productivity, not consumerability.

  14. I further like the idea of a fixed tax rebate to cover the poor.

    Why? I can think of no reason why any person whatsoever should not have to fork over 15 cents (or whatever) of each dollar he earns, even if he earns 1 dollar in total. You just have to factor that in as part of the cost of work and living, and if you’re an adult, it’s part of adulthood. If a kid earns $10 on a lemonade stand, theoretically he should send $1.50 to the Feds (although practically this is silly). If a teen earns $1,000 one year with his paper route, I see no reason for him not to be on the hook for $150 to the Feds. If nothing else, this absolute equality would remove a great deal of the class resentment you see now. There’d be no jockeying for Most Favored Victim status.

    Furthermore, I see no role at all for government, i.e. tax-funded charity. I find that obscene, since the very definition of charity is to give of your own resources, of your own free will, out of a kindly or empathic impulse. To think that stealing your neighbor’s wallet and giving it to a homeless man is an act of “charity” is a disgusting perversion of the concept.

    Charity has existed, and will always exist, for those down on their luck. It should continue to be a voluntary act of grace, for which we praise and reward (with social status) the donor.

  15. Furthermore, I see no role at all for government, i.e. tax-funded charity.

    When it comes to taking care of those less fortunate, I have to favor a safety net based on the rule of law over the rule of men. Charity is fickle. While I would agree that no one has a right to life (just ask the next lion you meet…), if we are to try to take care of those less fortunate, I think we should try to not be fickle or inefficient about it.

    Once upon a time people saw it as reasonable that they pay tax – that it was a worthy investment in a better society. If taxpayers actually get value for money, and the burden is not excessive, then objections become greatly diminished. The primary problem with the US is not the degree of taxation as such, but how inefficient and little the return for it is. Starving the beast currently seems the only hope to fix that.

  16. “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happyness.”

    In earlier drafts the last was a right to property. The meaning of the above quote is not that government should directly support the above rights by forcible transfer of wealth, but that the government should prevent others (including itself) from denying the individual enjoyment of their natural rights. Enslaving one person to provide for another violates the above named rights.

    The decomposing mass of vegetable matter clearly is missing something between the ears.

  17. The right to property originally included ownership of your self. So liberty and property ownership, the thing and the use of the thing, pretty much covered it all.

    Government is formed for a reason. Theft is the opposite of that reason.

    Recently the govt. confiscated 6 tons of silver from a fellow citizen. Why? Because he formed them into coins that people could trade. Why should that be illegal? In addition he’s in his sixties and facing 25 years in prison. What else might people trade that they decide to steal? Ironically, the judge called the accused a terrorist.

  18. When it comes to taking care of those less fortunate, I have to favor a safety net based on the rule of law over the rule of men.

    A disgusting concept, almost as morally corrupt as “the good of the many outweighs the good of the one,” which has been used to justify oppression and cruelty to individuals since time began.

    The “rule of law” is an algorithm, a computer program, even if it be set in motion by men. The idea that one would rather be judged by a computer program than by other men is evidence of significant moral decay, I think.

    Charity is fickle.

    What a crock and slander. Charity is, in fact, one of the eternal human constants. There was charity in 1 AD in Rome, there was charity in medieval Europe, there was charity in the Konzentrationslager and gulag, there is charity now, we can be sure it was present in 40,000 BC, too. It is present everywhere and everywhen because its motivating impulse — empathy for the plight of others — is woven into the human psyche.

    In fact, it takes external motivation to stop charity — you need a good external reason to not do what you can to help your stricken fellow man. You need to feel you “gave at the office” — or someone else did — in order to smugly pass him by. And, to the extent there is any data at all, I believe the evidence is that government charity programs do indeed reduce private charity, and those who most favor government “safety nets” do the least on their own for others.

    By contrast with the eternal, hard-wired impulse to charity among and between individual men, it’s government “safety nets” that are fickle and unreliable, that rest on the mood of the mob in Congress, the vagaries of the budget, and the whim of the President. Witness the coming and going of various forms of welfare. Witness the flopping around over Medicaid in health care reform, the Medicare reimbursements on the chopping block.

    If you are in trouble, who would you first call? Your mother? Father, brother, sister, friend, even your next-door neighbor of ten years? Or your Congressman’s office? Who does instinct tell you is a better bet, to feel genuine sympathy and actually want to see you better?

    You know the answer. And you know what, Pete? I don’t think you’re really talking about charity, about relief for human disaster. What you’re actually talking about is maintenance, the dole, paying off human beings not to revolt or turn to crime when you think they are unable to earn a decent living doing honorable work. It’s a substitute for trying to ensure that conditions are such that men in general can find honorable work, because it is common. It’s an evil twin of the statist impulse to regulate work in general and suppress private innovation — because those things make it hard for many to find honorable work. You have to have a “safety net” in collectivist economies, because you have destroyed the cultural mechanisms that would otherwise give men the chance to earn their own living.

  19. “While I would agree that no one has a right to life…”

    Pete, do you really mean that?

    Yes, it is the natural order of the world. A literal or metaphorical shark is not going to reframe from eating me because I am a human with some divine right to life. As a society we imperfectly and somewhat arbitrarily try to uphold various imperfect ideals, laws, rights, democracies, and so forth. These are not universals.

    If you think that there is a fundamental right to life, or any other lesser right for that matter, like freedom from terror, torture, physical abuse, slavery, etc., might I suggest you go check out the local cemetery.

    In truth, I think “right” is a very bad term. I suspect ideal would be a much better term, as it implies that it is the responsibility of all to try to uphold it, noting, that doing so will always be necessarily imperfect. At a fundamental level, it is perhaps unwise to completely depend upon the ideals of others (assume you have rights at your own risk).

  20. You have to have a “safety net” in collectivist economies, because you have destroyed the cultural mechanisms that would otherwise give men the chance to earn their own living.

    Yes, but wherever you get governments or people, you will get cultural inefficiencies and distortions. And a government might use safety nets as a crude tool to try and mitigate some of those distortions – the world is not perfect.

    Taking a step back, there seems to be an implicit assumption that the individual is the only fundamental unit of humanity, I do not agree with this. I would also apply libertarianism to the interactions of families, gangs, institutions, religions, cultures and governments. Look at an ant colony for example, are the worker ants free individuals or simply biological robots produced by the queen without individual freewill?

    While I think that human beings have a lot of freewill, and should for the most part be treated as individuals, I do not think that any of us are really entirely individuals. Most all of us share our identities, our very will to survive, with groups beyond ourselves. And so these groups to some extent have a life of their own (there is some philosophical discourse on this point) and should to some extent be treated as separate living entities.

    Just as individuals need to experiment, compete for survival and interact with one another, so do groups. Groups with lower degrees of individual level libertarianism may have higher group level libertarianism, the world needs to continually experiment and find out what works best. If low tax countries are better than high tax more collectivist countries, then let them prove it.

    Considering the number of high and low tax first world countries (both seem to work), my actual suspicion is that efficiency of government matters far more than extent of government (though a smaller inefficient government is much better than a large inefficient government). The embarrassing thing about the US is how inefficient the government has become by international standards, this is where I think the US has primarily lost its international competitiveness. I am not entirely sure how to fix this, but cutting back the size of government is probably a good starting point, though serious reform is still necessary. Beyond basic requirements, no government is better than inefficient government.

  21. And a government might use safety nets as a crude tool to try and mitigate some of those distortions

    So, what, you think applying inefficient stupid methods can hope to cure the ills caused by other inefficient stupid methods? You want to fix runaway acceleration by stepping on the gas? Fling gasoline on the fire in the hopes of smothering it, if you fling enough gasoline?

    Here’s a thought: why not use government as purely a negative brake on the madness of humans. Use government to simply ensure that humans cannot, for example, coerce each other by plain physical force. Every transaction must be voluntary. Use government to prevent fraud, deceit, and cheating: every transaction that meets certain standards — a contract — is enforceable by the government, and every contract founded on fraud or deceit is void, unenforceable. One last step: encourage free flow of information and innovation by prohibiting the govermment itself from interfering with free speech, with freely-made contracts, with in general individual liberty so long as it does not infringe on the right of others to be free from coercion.

    Sound familiar? Madison thought of this 220 years ago, and wrote it all down. What a pity we “experiment” with what has served us so very well. I guess it’s like Hollywood stars, who after they have achieved wide critical success and enormous wealth, blow it all on sex scandals and crack cocaine, trying to achieve not just mere earthly success but absolute Nirvana.

    If low tax countries are better than high tax more collectivist countries, then let them prove it.

    These and other issues — the general value of individual liberty over any amount of top-down social “good of the many” command structure — were proved long ago, by the spectactular success of European countries starting from the Renaissance, compared to the nations of Africa, Middle East, and Asia. In 1550 China was a far more powerful nation than Germany, France and England combined. The Arab Middle East was a powerful cultural center. What happened, eh? Europe prized individual liberty. Other places preferred the noble “social” goals defined by ideology (e.g. Confucianism) or religion (Islam).

    The results speak for themselves. Why anyone, e.g. Europeans, would feel the need to run the experiment again, only this time choose the other option, is beyond me. Maybe they don’t know their own history.

    More likely, the temptations of collectivism — the relief from the continually hard and unsettling prospect of making your own decisions, the continual anxiety of needing to rely only on your own judgment, you achieve when you surrender your sovereignty and liberty to a larger agency — to “professionals,” to the Pope or Dear Leader, to The Party — is endlessly seductive. Like the way even someone who has successfully lost weight and feels great by running every day will still long for a way to go back to eating potato chips and ice cream, watching Bones on the tube, and will be eternally susceptible to a con-man (or his own inner con-man) whispering Yes, it can be done! You can live far more easily! Just trust me — with your money, your vote, your time and effort, your conscience…

  22. So, what, you think applying inefficient stupid methods can hope to cure the ills caused by other inefficient stupid methods?

    Perfection is the enemy of the good. I would just hope for a system that prevents serious excesses, like the existing US government which seems to combine high taxation and high spending incompetence – the worst of both worlds. A government should be good enough that the people can afford to worry about other things.

  23. Well, then, Pete, why don’t we reduce government to the point where it only does things so obviously within its sphere of competence that we needn’t worry about it screwing up? Practice extremely conservative engineering, measure twice cut once, et cetera. I don’t think any of us thinks NIST is incompetent at setting weights and measures, nor that the Federal Highway Administration can’t build an Interstate, nor probably that the Department of Defense can beat the hell out of the Russians or Chinese.

    So how about we restrict government to those obviously straighforward tasks, and take all other functions, about which there is anything less than 98% consensus that government can do it well, off the table? Let’s tell the modern Democrats, with their notion that anything goes — any Dr. Frankenstein social Chernobyl horror — so long as some bare majority approves of it, once, and have them shove it up their bums. That is (coming full circle here) let’s prize individual liberty so much that we only collectivize those functions which nearly everybody agrees are better done that way. Problem solved! Both you and I will be happy.

  24. Might I add that, to reduce the cost of government, nobody actually has to lose his job at all? I looked into this recently. In the UK, a couple of months ago, some of the papers were screaming that “70,000 civil servants are going to lose their jobs”. I am working from memory here; but in the UK there are approximately 2 million civil service bureaucrats and “natural wastage” is about 8% per year. Do the maths. That is 160,000 chair-warmers leaving government service per year because of moving to the private sector, retirement or death. Nobody has to get fired; we simply have not to recruit anyone for a while. And the MSM are lying; no surprises there!

    I would be surprised if the US situation is much different.

  25. Fletcher-

    The only problem is that the US situation has been on such a large recruiting binge lately that using attrition to shrink the government is a much less effective means of getting it back under control than it would have been, say, 3 years ago or even 5 or 6 years ago.

    That is, it requires much more braking force to slow a car if you’ve got the accelerator mashed to the floor than if you’re just coasting along on cruise control.

  26. Carl writes:

    “That is (coming full circle here) let’s prize individual liberty so much that we only collectivize those functions which nearly everybody agrees are better done that way. ”

    There’s the rub. 50% of the nation will disagree with you and want to maintain the collectivization we have and even increase it.

    I agree with your sentiments, but your antecedent – nearly everybody prizing individual liberty – is not achieved. You have to solve that first.

    How do you do that?

    It has been my position for several years that the Conservative and/or Libertarian Proposition has not been explained/taught/illustrated/marketed and until you do, you won’t get that prizing of individual liberty.

  27. That’s not a bad point, Gregg. But the answer is the same as the answer for all social values: we need to rear our children that way. The blessings of liberty and the evils of collectivization should be drummed into the heads of little ones like the times tables.

    Or we could even just stop the incessant drumming into their heads of collectivist values that they get now, and see what happens. When was the last time you saw a kids’ TV show that praised individual initiative instead of consensus and collective action? (The Incredibles comes to mind, but only as the exception that proves the rule.)

    When was the last time a public high-school course explained to its students the immense contribution of individual enterprise to the wealth and success of the United States, instead of treating US history as one long glorious development of the perfect and omnipresent Big Brother state of regulation and moral oversight? When do we explain voting as a responsibility to spend your neighbor’s tax money responsibly and soberly, instead of the right to grab some of that money for yourself, or your interest group?

  28. Schools are full of such hidden lessons. I imagine many people have been a member of a student group at a college or high school and fought over a sum of money so paltry that a single student could have paid for the expenses of the group. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been in such a situation. Usually, the group has a sort of semi-official status (it has student members and that’s usually enough to pick up funding from the local student government in a college) and a token amount of public funds from the student government as a result. A common dilemma is whether to burn the money all at once (say on a party) or over time (say pizza every Tuesday night).

    So why don’t these student groups get more money? Because it’s easy for a student to belong to many groups while some groups are very good at collecting signatures and/or warm bodies. So you get tragedy of the commons with overconsumption of student government funds.

  29. we need to rear our children that way

    Problem identified is just part of the battle. Homeschooling has been part of the solution. But public schooling needs to be a priority and the evil party seems to have it all over the stupid party in that area.

    The tea party is focussed on reducing the size of govt. A natural ally would be some group that wants to take on the education issue.

  30. Carl Pham Says:

    “That’s not a bad point, Gregg. But the answer is the same as the answer for all social values: we need to rear our children that way. The blessings of liberty and the evils of collectivization should be drummed into the heads of little ones like the times tables.”

    It’s the solution Carl but it suffers from the same problem:

    50% of the parents of these kids love the redistribution indoctrination because that’s what they think as well. So they are going to inculcate the same viewpoints into their children. 50% of the working (or able to work) adult population no longer pay any federal income taxes – they love it just the way it is.

    And at least 50% of the teachers love it as well (probably more).

    Same problem as before just one step removed.

    The solution, I think, is voting activism by those who are Conservative/Libertarian. Plus a long, persistent, education of the populous by good speakers. Thomas Sowell has said as much: he says Conservatism can make a great case to the African-American population…if only someone would make it.

    And to underscore that general population education, I’m afraid you will also have to have hard times. When things are easy, people think about other things and don’t pay careful attention to their money or liberty.

    These days, some are making that case. I’m really encouraged by the election of people like Col. Allen West. What he represents, among other things, is about 500,000 people who spent time as soldiers at war. While these people are not uniformly conservative, they are almost always uniformly practical people. They do not run away from problems, but charge them and tear them apart. They have no time for weasel talk. And many are entering politics.

    And there’s Michael Williams – Railroad Commissioner in Texas – who sees the Conservative light. He spoke at the 2008 convention. There are a bunch of youtubes of his speeches out there and they are worth listening to. Especially the one on Energy solutions. He’s running for Senator in 2012 and I hope he wins.

    But for what you want, Carl, this isn’t enough. You are talking about inculcating Conservative, practical viewpoints in 51-53% of the nation. You have a base – not enough. Many Independents are close, but the deal must be closed. Persistent, patient, explanation underscored by real life major examples is what it will take. People simply do not value their liberty and they see a nation with so much wasted money that they figure no one ought to go hungry.

    That’s a powerfully attractive argument.

    And as you know:

    the forces of socialism and redistribution will never go away entirely.

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