I am tired of not talking about this, so I am going to talk about this. It will not be an easy post. Abuse survivors, this may be triggering.
I hate the lead-up to Saint Valentine's Day. Every year, when the candy-filled, heart-shaped boxes come out, there is invariably some moment at which some part of me goes completely off the rails. I begin to vacillate between alternate states of crazy, between totally emotional and totally cold. Simple as it is, rational me goes on strike and all my broken glory conquers all.
I can't remember his name. I wish I did, it would make the telling easier if I did. He was from Sarajevo. I don't recall if he was an asylee or refugee or just a regular immigrant. This is not a detail lost to the ravages of time, it is one I never knew. All I knew was he was smart, and he seemed nice, and told me I was pretty and that he wanted to be my valentine.
He lived in Manhattan, just south of Grand Central Station, and at the time I lived at Columbia. We made plans to meet at his house. The original version was we'd meet up at his place, we'd go to dinner, and then whatever happened, happened. I showed up at his apartment. It was beautiful. He had phenomenal views of midtown, ample space, the sorts of things that identify a Manhattanite as a member of the upper echelons of society. A few glasses of wine turned into the bottle, and plans of going out turned to plans of staying in.
I remember at one point in the evening thinking to myself perhaps I should not go all the way. Perhaps it was late into the evening. Maybe I had led him on. I was drunk, I was half naked, I was already there in his apartment, of course he would think as any man would that I wanted for all of this to happen. So when I told him no, he wrapped one arm around my neck, and one around my waist, and paid me no mind.
I didn't fight back. I buried my face in the pillow, scarcely able to breathe, my throat clenched in the crook of his arm as it were. He whispered in my ear, told me I was so good, to just let him finish, that he wanted this so bad. I have no concept of how long it took. When he was finished and got up off me, he told me it was my fault, that I had come to quickly (which was untrue, I had not come at all), and next time I should try and hold off. I said nothing to him. I gathered my bearings, dressed myself, and told him I had to go. He offered to call me a cab - and I just left. He made no effort to stop me.
It is four and a half miles from Grand Central Station to Columbia. My heart, mind and soul had left my body. I was nothing more than two feet, walking up Broadway. I wanted to be dead, and in a sense, I was. I got to my dorm room, took the elevator up, and by some freak occurrence my friend Robby was up and online.
I didn't have it in me to tell him what had happened. I could not summon up the appropriate words. I asked instead if I was a bad person, if I were a slut or a whore. I asked if I had done bad things. Was I a tease? Did I lead men on? I'm not sure how he saw through my bullshit but he did, and he zeroed in on what I wasn't saying. Somehow, and I still don't remember how, I got in contact with my friend Samrong, who lived in NYC, and walked the mile further uptown and slept like the dead on his hardwood floor.
I never went to the authorities. I probably could have had him deported, could have exacted if not justice at least vengeance, but I never did. I stayed silent. I was - am - so horridly ashamed that as a man I was too weak to have prevented this from happening. Of course, as a gay man, as a bottom, it was all too easy to envision being painted the vengeful bitch. I couldn't fathom being questioned on this. We'd had the conversation of what he and I were into sexually. If that's what I liked and told him it's what I liked how should he know the difference? To him, I was a slutty gay boy looking for some dick, and that's what he gave me.
This is the part that for me, thirteen years late, still breaks down. It's not about the sex - it's about control and violation. Every time I have not been able to talk about it, it has felt the same. Every time I have been dismissed as unable to understand the issue because I am male, it has felt the same. The misandry that follows this whither it may roam feels no different than his arm around my neck, choking me, silencing me, controlling me. It makes the world a very difficult place to live in.
I am still not fighting back. On this, the fight has gone out of me. All that remains is an enfeebled voice, learning to once more speak in the hopes of comforting somebody else.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Leaving Phoenix
Before I write the rest of this post, a disclaimer. I love my city. I moved to Arizona almost eight years ago, and the entire time, regardless of where my actual address was, I considered myself a Phoenician. When I finally left renting behind and bought a house, I would not hear of living in the 'burbs. It was Phoenix - and very specifically central Phoenix - or I wasn't doing it. I'm at 12th and Osborn now, smack middle of the block. I absolutely love living in a densely populated urban center where I can hear the birds in the back yard. There are world-class cultural venues on my doorstep. Every day I get the most spectacular view of Central Phoenix on my way to and back from work, courtesy of the HOV ramps from the 51 to I-10 East and back the other way, and every day it makes me smile.
That said, Phoenix is a screwed up place. There is too much undeveloped land. It is strangled by inadequate infrastructure. It labors under a "plan" that can barely be said to exist and badly needs to be reworked, if not tossed and rethought thanks to the great recession. In just one school district, my own, you get schools that get their As, and schools that rank meager Cs, and if you travel too far in any given direction those A-rated schools get farther and fewer between. We are awash in drug addicts. Homelessness remains a chronic problem, and you can't take an offramp anywhere in the city's core without seeing panhandlers or signs of them. Our historic buildings are forever at risk of the wrecking ball, victim of a city that has yet to make the pivot from reactive to proactive preservation policy. Perhaps, though, worst of it all, Phoenix feels like the diaspora of community. Where other communities would naturally take root and grow, where any other city this size would have its Chinatown, its Little Italy, its various immigrant enclaves and religious hubs, Phoenix has something that somewhat resembles a gayborhood, something else that somewhat resembles a barrio, a cluster of historic districts, and all those other communities have shattered against a ground so hard it can scarce be dug or tilled. It has crossed my mind, I must admit, to give up on any cultivation and leave.
But I can't leave here. Despite having stood at South Mountain and understood the depth of John 11:35, I cannot leave here. I see a city that is the test bed for liberalism. It is the argument built on desert sand that man is only bad due to bad structures and bad policy, and that if we abolish those he will naturally right himself and form new ones. We can point to example after example of completely bad policy. There is, of course, everyone's favorite hated Arizona policy - SB1070. We could decline to comply with it. It is an unfunded mandate, and we could very easily direct our police force that not one red cent of Phoenix's monies will pay for its enforcement. The city could refuse to pay for holding, transferring, or processing individuals under SB1070. We would in effect revert to our de facto status of sanctuary city. The reality, folks, is that "illegal aliens" have been living in Phoenix for as long as there has been a Phoenix to live in. The cleaning lady is not a threat to public safety - but the meth dealer you already have sufficient cause to hold very much is a threat, and he will be just fine in a jail in this country, rather than hurled across the border a free man.
It gets more obvious. Take the PHLOTE forms. These things serve one purpose and one purpose only - to take kids from Spanish-speaking homes, segregate them out of the classroom, impede their progress, and make them feel stupid and inferior for not speaking perfect flawless English like the white kids (who can't read, by the way). This shunts students into a program that makes them take English and only English, and nothing but English, until a test designed by English-speakers decides it is OK for them to study things other than English with students that speak English. Who decided this was a good idea? Why are we doing this? We've all seen Arizona's God-awful completion figures. If you take a chunk of students, and you make them not study content, for years, you are willfully causing that God-awful completion figure to exist. Further, you are ensuring that those children never get a chance to exchange ideas with peers that share their interests outside of their own linguistic block. Castaneda v. Pickard be damned, there is no legitimate educational need being served here - and the readily-available metrics quoted by the Governor herself should bolster our legal cover should such cover become necessary. Phoenix should inform the State that we intend to find a way to circumvent AZELLA, and then do so.
Though, city government could do more than nullify bad policy from the State. There is the matter of this foolish method of revenue collection the city uses - sales tax. We charge 2% on everything that is purchased within city limits. Land taxes, on the other hand, are peanuts. My fellow Phoenicians, I would like to take this moment to inform you that this is how you ensure your tax structure attempts to rob the poor for your revenues. It isn't effective. It isn't even efficient. It creates onerous bureaucratic burdens for business. It diminishes the purchasing power of every single consumer in city limits by 2%. That's an economic drag. At an assessed value of $12.3 billion (yes, billion), you could sneeze on the property tax rate and abolish the 2% sales tax. You wouldn't even have to do it in a revenue neutral way and you'd still cause virtually no economic pain. Let's say we wanted to raise twice the amount of tax through property taxes as we do now from sales tax - which would be about $1.2 million. We're talking a property tax rate increase in the pennies to get completely rid of the city sales tax. Gone Adios. Two percent more stuff being purchased in exchange for everyone pays one percent more property tax. Yes, this requires a referendum, but really, how do you make an argument against a fairer tax policy that raises more money and causes less pain? The neighboring cities might hate it, but then, they might copy it, too. In a city of 1.5 million people, making on average some thirty-six grand a year, this is an impact of somewhere in the $600-$700 per person ballpark that would not be spent on taxes, and could be spent on goods and services. Let's say my late-night napkin math is way off. Let's say this only restore $300 in purchasing power to every Phoenician on average. This is still $450M back into the local economy. In exchange for this huge boom in purchasing power, we are going to ask everyone that owns land - i.e. the business that will profit handsomely off all this new purchasing power - to pay a wee little sneeze more in property taxes. If you can find me the business leader who will not trade a $0.02 per $100 assessed value property tax increase for 2% more sales, I'll give you a quarter (and I'll probably slap him).
Now, property taxes are only valuable on property that is developed. Vacant lots are death to the tax base. They erode the value of the land around them. If only there were a way that the city could invest in itself! If only some provision of the charter allowed the city to engage in industry! Oh, but if only some legal framework existed whereby the city could snatch away a piece of land at these locked-in-by-law bottom of the bust land prices and fruitully employ it!
Oh wait, there totally is - and if we're smart we'll hijack money from Washington to do it. Follow the crazy idea.
Remember the drug problem I talked about up above? Addiction and mental disorders receive parity for treatment under the Affordable Care Act starting in 2014 - including under Medicaid. There simply aren't the facilities in existence to treat them all and deal with them all. The city charter explicitly authorizes the city to engage in industry by whatever means necessary. Under eminent domain, the city would only need to pay the appraised price, and 2012's Prop 117 ensures that those valuations will stay in bargain-basement territory for the next decade. The city could snap up derelict buildings and empty lots, create its own clinics of all manner - from urgent care to general practices to STD clinics to, yes, addiction treatment centers - and start scraping people up off the street and putting them back together again. If private practice can do this profitably, what on earth stops public practice from likewise doing it profitably? It's not like the market for health care is so small that behemoths like Banner will get crowded out any time soon. Hell, at customary rates, these facilities would pump money back into the city coffers at a brisk clip, and create scores of high-paying healthcare jobs in fields and communities that tend to be woefully under-served. We could pair this with existing drug interdiction programs and instead of just the incessant chain of incarceration that costs money and drains resources, maybe rehabilitate so much as a handful through a process that creates resources and maybe, just maybe, will let that person become a productive member of society instead of a felon. We would no longer need to let our fellow men die by the wayside.
The industry piece of it goes on, mind you. APS would hate it, but we could use the roof of absolutely every government building and every single parking lot that the city of Phoenix owns, lease it all out for solar panels, and save a fortune on electric costs. Considering the absurd amount of recyclables the city takes in every year, we could likely work a better deal than just handing it over to whomever - like a public-private partnership to bring an actual recycling plant to Phoenix, and create good, high-paying, blue-collar union jobs to take up some of the slack from construction as we transition from growth to sustainability. We could get into housing, into parking, into pharmacies - into whatever hole in the local economy city government chooses to plug up, just by exercising existing power under existing law, and we can get a quick cheap easy half million a year on a no-brainer of a tax change that I can't fathom the voters not going for, if we can just be brave enough to do it.
That, however, is why I love Phoenix. Phoenix is a brave city. It exists in one of the harshest climates in the nation, and yet it has matured into the nation's fifth-largest metropolis. It dares to think of places like airports as being friendly. There was a once upon a time, not too long ago, that it even dared innovate, and innovate successfully, on public policy. If this city is going to rise up again, if we are going to permanently establish our own prosperity, if it is going to make of itself the fertile soil in which communities can take root instead of barren waste where they whither, then it must be brave again. Personally, I do not believe Phoenix's best days are behind her. There will be no leaving Phoenix for me.
That said, Phoenix is a screwed up place. There is too much undeveloped land. It is strangled by inadequate infrastructure. It labors under a "plan" that can barely be said to exist and badly needs to be reworked, if not tossed and rethought thanks to the great recession. In just one school district, my own, you get schools that get their As, and schools that rank meager Cs, and if you travel too far in any given direction those A-rated schools get farther and fewer between. We are awash in drug addicts. Homelessness remains a chronic problem, and you can't take an offramp anywhere in the city's core without seeing panhandlers or signs of them. Our historic buildings are forever at risk of the wrecking ball, victim of a city that has yet to make the pivot from reactive to proactive preservation policy. Perhaps, though, worst of it all, Phoenix feels like the diaspora of community. Where other communities would naturally take root and grow, where any other city this size would have its Chinatown, its Little Italy, its various immigrant enclaves and religious hubs, Phoenix has something that somewhat resembles a gayborhood, something else that somewhat resembles a barrio, a cluster of historic districts, and all those other communities have shattered against a ground so hard it can scarce be dug or tilled. It has crossed my mind, I must admit, to give up on any cultivation and leave.
But I can't leave here. Despite having stood at South Mountain and understood the depth of John 11:35, I cannot leave here. I see a city that is the test bed for liberalism. It is the argument built on desert sand that man is only bad due to bad structures and bad policy, and that if we abolish those he will naturally right himself and form new ones. We can point to example after example of completely bad policy. There is, of course, everyone's favorite hated Arizona policy - SB1070. We could decline to comply with it. It is an unfunded mandate, and we could very easily direct our police force that not one red cent of Phoenix's monies will pay for its enforcement. The city could refuse to pay for holding, transferring, or processing individuals under SB1070. We would in effect revert to our de facto status of sanctuary city. The reality, folks, is that "illegal aliens" have been living in Phoenix for as long as there has been a Phoenix to live in. The cleaning lady is not a threat to public safety - but the meth dealer you already have sufficient cause to hold very much is a threat, and he will be just fine in a jail in this country, rather than hurled across the border a free man.
It gets more obvious. Take the PHLOTE forms. These things serve one purpose and one purpose only - to take kids from Spanish-speaking homes, segregate them out of the classroom, impede their progress, and make them feel stupid and inferior for not speaking perfect flawless English like the white kids (who can't read, by the way). This shunts students into a program that makes them take English and only English, and nothing but English, until a test designed by English-speakers decides it is OK for them to study things other than English with students that speak English. Who decided this was a good idea? Why are we doing this? We've all seen Arizona's God-awful completion figures. If you take a chunk of students, and you make them not study content, for years, you are willfully causing that God-awful completion figure to exist. Further, you are ensuring that those children never get a chance to exchange ideas with peers that share their interests outside of their own linguistic block. Castaneda v. Pickard be damned, there is no legitimate educational need being served here - and the readily-available metrics quoted by the Governor herself should bolster our legal cover should such cover become necessary. Phoenix should inform the State that we intend to find a way to circumvent AZELLA, and then do so.
Though, city government could do more than nullify bad policy from the State. There is the matter of this foolish method of revenue collection the city uses - sales tax. We charge 2% on everything that is purchased within city limits. Land taxes, on the other hand, are peanuts. My fellow Phoenicians, I would like to take this moment to inform you that this is how you ensure your tax structure attempts to rob the poor for your revenues. It isn't effective. It isn't even efficient. It creates onerous bureaucratic burdens for business. It diminishes the purchasing power of every single consumer in city limits by 2%. That's an economic drag. At an assessed value of $12.3 billion (yes, billion), you could sneeze on the property tax rate and abolish the 2% sales tax. You wouldn't even have to do it in a revenue neutral way and you'd still cause virtually no economic pain. Let's say we wanted to raise twice the amount of tax through property taxes as we do now from sales tax - which would be about $1.2 million. We're talking a property tax rate increase in the pennies to get completely rid of the city sales tax. Gone Adios. Two percent more stuff being purchased in exchange for everyone pays one percent more property tax. Yes, this requires a referendum, but really, how do you make an argument against a fairer tax policy that raises more money and causes less pain? The neighboring cities might hate it, but then, they might copy it, too. In a city of 1.5 million people, making on average some thirty-six grand a year, this is an impact of somewhere in the $600-$700 per person ballpark that would not be spent on taxes, and could be spent on goods and services. Let's say my late-night napkin math is way off. Let's say this only restore $300 in purchasing power to every Phoenician on average. This is still $450M back into the local economy. In exchange for this huge boom in purchasing power, we are going to ask everyone that owns land - i.e. the business that will profit handsomely off all this new purchasing power - to pay a wee little sneeze more in property taxes. If you can find me the business leader who will not trade a $0.02 per $100 assessed value property tax increase for 2% more sales, I'll give you a quarter (and I'll probably slap him).
Now, property taxes are only valuable on property that is developed. Vacant lots are death to the tax base. They erode the value of the land around them. If only there were a way that the city could invest in itself! If only some provision of the charter allowed the city to engage in industry! Oh, but if only some legal framework existed whereby the city could snatch away a piece of land at these locked-in-by-law bottom of the bust land prices and fruitully employ it!
Oh wait, there totally is - and if we're smart we'll hijack money from Washington to do it. Follow the crazy idea.
Remember the drug problem I talked about up above? Addiction and mental disorders receive parity for treatment under the Affordable Care Act starting in 2014 - including under Medicaid. There simply aren't the facilities in existence to treat them all and deal with them all. The city charter explicitly authorizes the city to engage in industry by whatever means necessary. Under eminent domain, the city would only need to pay the appraised price, and 2012's Prop 117 ensures that those valuations will stay in bargain-basement territory for the next decade. The city could snap up derelict buildings and empty lots, create its own clinics of all manner - from urgent care to general practices to STD clinics to, yes, addiction treatment centers - and start scraping people up off the street and putting them back together again. If private practice can do this profitably, what on earth stops public practice from likewise doing it profitably? It's not like the market for health care is so small that behemoths like Banner will get crowded out any time soon. Hell, at customary rates, these facilities would pump money back into the city coffers at a brisk clip, and create scores of high-paying healthcare jobs in fields and communities that tend to be woefully under-served. We could pair this with existing drug interdiction programs and instead of just the incessant chain of incarceration that costs money and drains resources, maybe rehabilitate so much as a handful through a process that creates resources and maybe, just maybe, will let that person become a productive member of society instead of a felon. We would no longer need to let our fellow men die by the wayside.
The industry piece of it goes on, mind you. APS would hate it, but we could use the roof of absolutely every government building and every single parking lot that the city of Phoenix owns, lease it all out for solar panels, and save a fortune on electric costs. Considering the absurd amount of recyclables the city takes in every year, we could likely work a better deal than just handing it over to whomever - like a public-private partnership to bring an actual recycling plant to Phoenix, and create good, high-paying, blue-collar union jobs to take up some of the slack from construction as we transition from growth to sustainability. We could get into housing, into parking, into pharmacies - into whatever hole in the local economy city government chooses to plug up, just by exercising existing power under existing law, and we can get a quick cheap easy half million a year on a no-brainer of a tax change that I can't fathom the voters not going for, if we can just be brave enough to do it.
That, however, is why I love Phoenix. Phoenix is a brave city. It exists in one of the harshest climates in the nation, and yet it has matured into the nation's fifth-largest metropolis. It dares to think of places like airports as being friendly. There was a once upon a time, not too long ago, that it even dared innovate, and innovate successfully, on public policy. If this city is going to rise up again, if we are going to permanently establish our own prosperity, if it is going to make of itself the fertile soil in which communities can take root instead of barren waste where they whither, then it must be brave again. Personally, I do not believe Phoenix's best days are behind her. There will be no leaving Phoenix for me.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Confessions of a Policy Wonk
I, Jo Hafford, resident of Phoenix, Arizona, am a liberal policy wonk. During the 2012 campaign cycle, when folks were bemoaning how similar the parties were, I knew the policy differences not from the Sunday shows but from their white papers - which I read, though I don't think Mitt Romney did. Simpson-Bowles? Yeah, I know why that didn't pass, and will never pass, and should never pass. Even here locally, in my fourth-bluest-in-the-state legislative district, I felt it necessary to read the House Minority Leader's legislation before making like a good little volunteer and falling in line (turns out he's farking brilliant on policy, but more on that at a later date).
There is, however, a problem with trying to be this familiar with policy, to say nothing of honestly loving the process that no one should watch up close. There are vast swaths of public policy that are unabashedly stupid. No, I'm not talking about the fiscal hara-kiri. That, for liberals, is genius, and at least short term will glue budget talks to the things that are actually in the budget - like do we want taxes, or do we want education, for example. I'm talking about things like the milk mess.
The milk mess would not exist were it not for a piece of legislation that never really got overturned, it just got papered over. Think of it like having a hornet's nest in your house, but instead of removing the hornet's nest, you get some really heavy wallpaper and just keep gluing another layer up there every few years. The mechanism that will (and I mean will) drive milk to $8 a gallon, to say nothing of the price of everything from cheese to chocolate, is still there in the statute. It's there for want of a single sentence in the Farm Bill - repealing not the Agricultural Act of 1948, but the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938. That, Speaker Boehner, is your Soviet-style dairy policy, that ties commodity prices to the commodity producer's standard of living. The reality is good ol' American capitalism and ingenuity have rendered that thing more or less useless, and it should go, but it doesn't. It is not still in the law because we don't know how to repeal a law - the House of Representatives symbolically repealed Obamacare 31 times, they totally understand repeal. It just never occurs to them "Hey, this law is crap, let's get rid of it."
There are other chunks of stupid in American policy. Everyone's hair is on fire over President Obama having given Congress a raise of about $900. Here's the deal - by law, Congress has gotten a cost of living adjustment for decades now. They've routinely rejected it for years. For the last two years, there has been a pay freeze in effect for all civilian employees of the federal government - all of them - and the only getting around it is by executive order, which we've done, for two years. Prior to that, cost of living adjustments were made by a matter of statute since forever, but what we've actually paid federal civilian employees has been dictated by the President since Bush 41.
That's right, kids. Doesn't matter if we're talking Biden or a petty warrant officer. If your job in federal government falls somewhere in the purview of the Executive, your pay has not been tied to your performance, or your tenure, or even a collective bargaining agreement for the last generation. The President picks up a pen and essentially decides, "OK, I will pay you this much," and that's what we pay you, by way of executive order. The average American wouldn't run a hot dog stand this way, much less the governing structure of the world's largest economy. But on we putter with this really asinine piece of policy that nobody seems to be willing to call out for what it is. The last attempt at a federal merit system was Carter, and Reagan chucked that along with everything else Carter tried to do, and we've never looked back.
Then there's the other thing we haven't tried to do since Carter - energy policy. Right now, it is a popular trick of demagoguery to rabble on about gas prices. It's like the common wisdom that when you're really desperate, and everyone is ignoring you, stand up and holler "TWO DOLLAR GAS!" as loud as you can, and the media will instantly hand you the microphone. Two dollar gas is never coming back, folks. Saudi Arabia can't support itself at the oil prices necessary for two dollar gas to be profitable ever again, and we'll do well to stick around three dollars for the near future. As the middle eastern OPEC nations become ever less stable - and have to throw around ever more largess to keep themselves in power - expect the price of oil to trend upwards over time, and take the cost of gasoline with it. Even after we throw a bazillion dollars at Big Oil, and even after Big Oil returns the favor with the lowest gas prices in the world (and they do), we are never ever ever going to see long term trendlines for gasoline, or for fossil fuels in general, trend down. Shan't happen.
So what's a wealthy, developed nation to do? Simple - you pull a Germany and build something else. You do this part, yes, through debt, but part through starting to siphon off these massive oil subsidies, and let the price of gas (and the tax revenues it takes in) drift upwards. Yes, this is hardcore economic engineering, but all policy is engineering of some sort. We could repurpose existing oil subsidies to retooling gas stations to provide hydrogen, for example. Or encourage oil companies to go into your local apartment complex, sign a deal with the property owner, and stick a recharging station in all of those spaces. Hell, they could get really clever and convert the covered parking to solar panels in some parts of the country. Or, as a nation, we could decide you know what, screw you Big Oil, we're gonna build that ourselves. We could take all those billions, build our own infrastructure, reduce our dependency on gasoline by orders of magnitude, start buying back gas vehicles, and let Big Oil shrivel down to Medium-Sized Oil. But we don't, because we talk about gasoline prices as if they were a barometer of anything in the universe, which they aren't. That, my friends, is stupidity in American policy making at work.
I could talk taxes. Tax policy in America is really, really stupid. From income tax to estate tax to sales tax, it's all so bloody dumb I could scream. We all know sales taxes are hideously regressive. We all know estate taxes are ham-handed efforts to prevent dynastic control of the economy (news flash: didn't work). We all know we have the highest corporate tax rates in the world that nobody pays. So what do we do? We nibble around the edges of this splendidly stupid section of policy, and bicker about a measly 3% in the rates. Really? 3%? Y'all want to fight over $800B when we need closer to $4T? The one whole sole and only reason I am not throwing a full-on tantrum over this right here and now is I'm working on a better plan.
This brings me to the confession I must make as even just a minor policy wonk. Everything, everything, has a highly technical plan to fix it. I am doggedly interested in these highly technical fixes. It's why I write this blog, why I'm politically active, and why every time I hear John McCain on TV I have to check myself for signs of an aneurysm. On policy, you will never hear conservative and liberal policy wonks prattle on the way demagogues and ideologues do. This was Paul Ryan's tell of how we knew he was not one of us - no real wonk in this life is ever going to hold up a damn philosopher as the backbone of a plan, ever, unless there's one out there I'm not aware of named Calculator. This is how we know John McCain is not one of us, too. When your objection is "lead from behind", when your answer to everything is boots on the ground and arm the rebels, you have stopped looking for technical solutions to achieve a definitive goal. You're just a war hawk.
Government has definitive goals because society has definitive goals, and society has definitive goals because the individuals that comprise it have definitive goals. We should not be bickering about what those goals are. The blatherskite of how American America can be and in America we have these American values that are American and blah blah blah from our politicians should be screamed down for the blatherskite it is. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, Amendments 1 through 26 - got it. These things do not need further defining, nor do they necessarily need tidbits like "Christian" or "traditional" or "English-speaking" jammed in them. These things need to be indefatigably worked toward. I confess that I want for the public discourse to be focused to the exclusion of all else on policy that does just that, and does it in a provable, mathematically sound way. And I confess that every time I hear someone rattle off an unprovable or flatly untrue talking point because they don't have a logical, well-reasoned counter, I want to whack them with an abacus.
There is, however, a problem with trying to be this familiar with policy, to say nothing of honestly loving the process that no one should watch up close. There are vast swaths of public policy that are unabashedly stupid. No, I'm not talking about the fiscal hara-kiri. That, for liberals, is genius, and at least short term will glue budget talks to the things that are actually in the budget - like do we want taxes, or do we want education, for example. I'm talking about things like the milk mess.
The milk mess would not exist were it not for a piece of legislation that never really got overturned, it just got papered over. Think of it like having a hornet's nest in your house, but instead of removing the hornet's nest, you get some really heavy wallpaper and just keep gluing another layer up there every few years. The mechanism that will (and I mean will) drive milk to $8 a gallon, to say nothing of the price of everything from cheese to chocolate, is still there in the statute. It's there for want of a single sentence in the Farm Bill - repealing not the Agricultural Act of 1948, but the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938. That, Speaker Boehner, is your Soviet-style dairy policy, that ties commodity prices to the commodity producer's standard of living. The reality is good ol' American capitalism and ingenuity have rendered that thing more or less useless, and it should go, but it doesn't. It is not still in the law because we don't know how to repeal a law - the House of Representatives symbolically repealed Obamacare 31 times, they totally understand repeal. It just never occurs to them "Hey, this law is crap, let's get rid of it."
There are other chunks of stupid in American policy. Everyone's hair is on fire over President Obama having given Congress a raise of about $900. Here's the deal - by law, Congress has gotten a cost of living adjustment for decades now. They've routinely rejected it for years. For the last two years, there has been a pay freeze in effect for all civilian employees of the federal government - all of them - and the only getting around it is by executive order, which we've done, for two years. Prior to that, cost of living adjustments were made by a matter of statute since forever, but what we've actually paid federal civilian employees has been dictated by the President since Bush 41.
That's right, kids. Doesn't matter if we're talking Biden or a petty warrant officer. If your job in federal government falls somewhere in the purview of the Executive, your pay has not been tied to your performance, or your tenure, or even a collective bargaining agreement for the last generation. The President picks up a pen and essentially decides, "OK, I will pay you this much," and that's what we pay you, by way of executive order. The average American wouldn't run a hot dog stand this way, much less the governing structure of the world's largest economy. But on we putter with this really asinine piece of policy that nobody seems to be willing to call out for what it is. The last attempt at a federal merit system was Carter, and Reagan chucked that along with everything else Carter tried to do, and we've never looked back.
Then there's the other thing we haven't tried to do since Carter - energy policy. Right now, it is a popular trick of demagoguery to rabble on about gas prices. It's like the common wisdom that when you're really desperate, and everyone is ignoring you, stand up and holler "TWO DOLLAR GAS!" as loud as you can, and the media will instantly hand you the microphone. Two dollar gas is never coming back, folks. Saudi Arabia can't support itself at the oil prices necessary for two dollar gas to be profitable ever again, and we'll do well to stick around three dollars for the near future. As the middle eastern OPEC nations become ever less stable - and have to throw around ever more largess to keep themselves in power - expect the price of oil to trend upwards over time, and take the cost of gasoline with it. Even after we throw a bazillion dollars at Big Oil, and even after Big Oil returns the favor with the lowest gas prices in the world (and they do), we are never ever ever going to see long term trendlines for gasoline, or for fossil fuels in general, trend down. Shan't happen.
So what's a wealthy, developed nation to do? Simple - you pull a Germany and build something else. You do this part, yes, through debt, but part through starting to siphon off these massive oil subsidies, and let the price of gas (and the tax revenues it takes in) drift upwards. Yes, this is hardcore economic engineering, but all policy is engineering of some sort. We could repurpose existing oil subsidies to retooling gas stations to provide hydrogen, for example. Or encourage oil companies to go into your local apartment complex, sign a deal with the property owner, and stick a recharging station in all of those spaces. Hell, they could get really clever and convert the covered parking to solar panels in some parts of the country. Or, as a nation, we could decide you know what, screw you Big Oil, we're gonna build that ourselves. We could take all those billions, build our own infrastructure, reduce our dependency on gasoline by orders of magnitude, start buying back gas vehicles, and let Big Oil shrivel down to Medium-Sized Oil. But we don't, because we talk about gasoline prices as if they were a barometer of anything in the universe, which they aren't. That, my friends, is stupidity in American policy making at work.
I could talk taxes. Tax policy in America is really, really stupid. From income tax to estate tax to sales tax, it's all so bloody dumb I could scream. We all know sales taxes are hideously regressive. We all know estate taxes are ham-handed efforts to prevent dynastic control of the economy (news flash: didn't work). We all know we have the highest corporate tax rates in the world that nobody pays. So what do we do? We nibble around the edges of this splendidly stupid section of policy, and bicker about a measly 3% in the rates. Really? 3%? Y'all want to fight over $800B when we need closer to $4T? The one whole sole and only reason I am not throwing a full-on tantrum over this right here and now is I'm working on a better plan.
This brings me to the confession I must make as even just a minor policy wonk. Everything, everything, has a highly technical plan to fix it. I am doggedly interested in these highly technical fixes. It's why I write this blog, why I'm politically active, and why every time I hear John McCain on TV I have to check myself for signs of an aneurysm. On policy, you will never hear conservative and liberal policy wonks prattle on the way demagogues and ideologues do. This was Paul Ryan's tell of how we knew he was not one of us - no real wonk in this life is ever going to hold up a damn philosopher as the backbone of a plan, ever, unless there's one out there I'm not aware of named Calculator. This is how we know John McCain is not one of us, too. When your objection is "lead from behind", when your answer to everything is boots on the ground and arm the rebels, you have stopped looking for technical solutions to achieve a definitive goal. You're just a war hawk.
Government has definitive goals because society has definitive goals, and society has definitive goals because the individuals that comprise it have definitive goals. We should not be bickering about what those goals are. The blatherskite of how American America can be and in America we have these American values that are American and blah blah blah from our politicians should be screamed down for the blatherskite it is. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, Amendments 1 through 26 - got it. These things do not need further defining, nor do they necessarily need tidbits like "Christian" or "traditional" or "English-speaking" jammed in them. These things need to be indefatigably worked toward. I confess that I want for the public discourse to be focused to the exclusion of all else on policy that does just that, and does it in a provable, mathematically sound way. And I confess that every time I hear someone rattle off an unprovable or flatly untrue talking point because they don't have a logical, well-reasoned counter, I want to whack them with an abacus.
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