The Pace of Political Evil

US politics has lost its civility. Civility kept progress on the Conservative agenda slow, and it created time and opportunity for opposition response. In recent years, this pressure has intensified in speed and scope, making it hard to respond effectively in any civil way.

Trump is not the only player in this. Others, working patiently over decades, laid a foundation that was ripe for the arrival of someone like him. The system has been weakened over time. Gerrymandering, the Citizens United ruling, and the stacking of the Supreme Court are examples.

But Trump has been a definite innovator in the sociopathic governance space. His two primary innovations, either one of which would be sufficient to explain the reverence of the rich and power-hungry, have been:

1. 

   The outright shredding of shame, and the important social safeguard that shame had previously provided. Prior to this, there were a great many things no politician would dare try because of fear of being found out; Trump showed that fear to be a waste of time. Far too many voters are willing to turn a blind eye to shameful behavior that comes from a politician that otherwise serves them, which has allowed the GOP to very rapidly morph into the Party of Machiavelli.

2. The observation that massive numbers of voters don't check truth or consistency. Prior to this, politicians feared injuring their own supporters, which led to a natural reserve in how nasty a policy could be; Trump has shown that it's a productive strategy to create policies actively hurtful to one's own base, who will notice the pain but not bother to find out where it comes from, preferring to just be blindly angry, without direction, and to just wait to be told by tribal leaders who they should be angry at.

The consequences of these shifts are legion, far too numerous to discuss here in detail, but they include corrupt behavior to acquire and keep office, and the open incitement of and condoning of political violence, even to include outright insurrection. These also include ever more blatant acts of judicial activism by a questionably seated and plainly corrupt majority of the Supreme Court. Openly scornful of any suggestion that they be bound by an ethics code, they are apparently bent on taking a buzz saw to long-standing readings of the Constitution in favor of uglier ends—probably to include the present trend of the Republican party toward White Christian Nationalism.

The basic problem is that the founders did not anticipate this speed and scope. The safeguards they built in were few, and the presumption was that the system would be self-correcting, patching small holes on a one-off basis as they came up. The Supreme Court was designed for perhaps a challenge or two per Presidential term. Even if it was still functioning in a properly ethical way, it would not be up to the present onslaught of challenges—as I had warned about in a tweet on ex-Twitter a month before the 2016 election:

"Trump…involved in a startling 3,500 legal actions".

Visualize 3,500 Constitutional challenges by a #bully #President flexing his muscles. https://t.co/6HffNXKA7y

— Kent Pitman 🌎 (@KentPitman) October 13, 2016

 

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Author's Note:

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The graphics were created at abacus.ai via its ChatLLM facility.

The prompt for the paperwork graphic, created by FLUX.1 was "create a black and white graphic that shows someone with a xerox machine that is rapidly spewing out legal documents in the direction of a model of the supreme court". I'm not sure what I expected as a result of that. A smaller court building, for one. But I guess this was sort of responsive.

The prompt for the shame graphic, created by DALL-E, was "create a simple black and white graphic sketched graphic of a man whose face is vaguely like donald trump, but feeling shame with one hand over his face and the other hand extended into the foreground, palm up and out, in a stop gesture intended to hold nearby people at bay." You can see it ignored parts of my request.

Enough

A lot of the discussions we have about what's fair to tax seem to refer to questions of how people should “share the pain.” I don't like the way that discussion usually goes, but not because I don't think people should share pain. I just question the definition of “pain” that seems to get used.

And I should say at the outset that frequently when this discussion of alleged pain sharing comes up, a flat tax gets suggested as well. For some reason this is often asserted to be more fair. I don't think it is. But I'm going to assume a flat tax for presentation purposes here because a lot of people don't seem to understand how to visualize our present progressive tax system. Doing so won't affect any of the points I have to make.

Let's begin by looking at how this sharing of the pain is supposed to work. We'll imagine three different incomes of different sizes. We'll assume everyone is paying a proportional amount of their income. 15% is often suggested as an ideal flat tax. But it made my picture hard to annotate. So I'm going to use 30%. Again, it won't affect my point.

So here are some typical incomes. The green indicates the take-home that you have, and the gray is tax taken out. The longer bars are people making more income. The shorter bar is someone making less income. But it's all proportional, so it's all fair—right? Well, we'll come back to that.

Now the discussion is about the current suggestion that we take out more tax on people who have very high incomes. That would look like this:

The argument is made by those who might stand to lose that they're already paying a huge amount of tax. And now we want more. Oh woe is them. Look at that giant red bite. In fact, look hard at it. Focus on it. Be hypnotized by it. Especially don't look at the green part to the left of it because if you look there, you might not feel like the person who's complaining is hurting so much. Just look to the red.

Actually, that's not the real argument I want to make. But it is one thing that should already have you thinking “Maybe proportionality isn't all there is to this picture.” Those pushing proportionality would be happier with this picture because they like the idea of shared pain:

There's another concept I want to introduce at this point. I'm going to call it the concept of “enough.” We can have a discussion later about what that line is. But wherever it is, the line of “enough” is what I want to define as the line where people can reasonably live. It supports sentences like “I don't have enough.” or “You have more than enough.” It looks like this:

Right away, you notice that some people might not make enough. In this chart, everyone makes enough before taxes, but after existing taxes, one person is already hurting. I've marked that in red. And that's with the proportional tax. They had just barely enough, but merely asking them to participate in taxes meant they didn't have enough after all. I don't think people who make exactly enough or less than enough should have to pay taxes. It's a sham. If they're really not making enough, someone will have to help them—either another person or the government. Why take money away just to give it back? Unless people are making enough, there's no real money to take.

And if we want to add more tax, is that increasing the pain? Well, sure, for those who are not making enough. Because they're the ones whose needs are being cut into. Above the line of enough, I don't think it's fair to say you're experiencing pain in the first place, and unless the increase in tax causes you to cross the enough line, I don't think you get to complain about increased pain—or pain at all.

And this is the thing. Incomes scale but needs really don't. Oh, sure, we can all get used to having really big houses, vacation homes, jets, really nice clothes, etc. I think it's great to have things like that. But when you get to the point of not just having them but not knowing how you'd live without them, and not being willing to sacrifice some of that for the sake of others who are truly needy, you're pushing a line with me. Certainly, at minimum, if you claim to be experiencing pain because you don't receive money at quite the lavish level you've been used to receiving it, you've lost all touch. It's time to be reminded that you're behaving like a spoiled child and to be told that you should be ashamed.

Proportionality doesn't work without exemptions for the low end. That's why we have a progressive tax system.

And sharing the pain equally is meaningless because we're not all in pain. If you're making enough, at least have the courtesy to acknowledge the fact. You're not showing yourself in a flattering light when you behave like you're hurting if you're not. The world has bigger problems than your imagined pain.

Enough of that.

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Originally published August 10, 2011 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

This post was an Open Salon “Editor’s Pick”.

Past Articles by me on Related Topics
Tax Policy and the Dewey Decimal System
Redistributing Burden

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, fair tax, proportional tax, shame, ashamed, hurting, pain, share the pain, sharing the pain, proportional, proportionality, enough, not enough, more than enough, surplus, need, needs, want, wants, taxation