A Long-Term Plan for Debt Elimination

 In the USA, we've been hearing about "the deficit" for decades. Any nation has to figure out its cash flow to finance all of its domestic and international activities. The not-yet United States came out of its war of separation from Great Britain with a mountain of debt. The amount has gone up and down, but never gone completely away.

For those of us in the lower tiers of the economy, the economics are clear: you need a definite amount of money to service a definite amount of debt. I don't mean people on public assistance or evading social safety nets. I mean the working and lower middle classes. As you go up from there, the lines become blurrier. The more money you have or can make people think you have, the less you have to make every equation balance all the time with solid cash or collateral. Once you reach the status of a billionaire or a nation, it gets very mumbly. 

Large financial entities with whole departments of lawyers and accountants can play off perceived assets against negotiable debts for decades or, in the case of nations, centuries. Somewhere in the US deficit is probably a line item for cannonballs bought with French funds in 1779. Allied nations have been helping each other out in various conflicts throughout history, with the ledgers balanced by returned favors as well as money. As with any friend to whom you owe money, it only becomes a problem if you have friction. These times come and go. The international community bumps along.

Bankruptcy ceased to be the kind of shame that would drive a tycoon to suicide by the mid 20th Century. Now it's just another device in the corporate toolkit to avoid paying back the full amount that you owe. Sometimes it means liquidation and the corporate equivalent of death. Other times it just means a restart with the pesky loans and losses recalculated.

For individuals, the process is a bit more dire. Individuals can declare bankruptcy, as can small businesses, but the consequences weigh on them more heavily and for longer than would be the case for a massive corporation whose collapse sends shock waves through the global economy and plunges thousands of people into unemployment, poverty, and fear. We must be stern with our erring children, and force them to learn from their mistakes. Keep the little people in line.

Starting in 1980, Republicans instituted policies that favored reducing government income. This has had the predictable effect of raising government debt. The other half of the Republican equation was their drive to make government smaller, releasing the controls on businesses, especially large and powerful corporations, while slashing and burning the social safety nets that they asserted were just making hammocks for born losers, and tangling the feet of an agile economy just waiting to sprint to nationwide wealth. In order to get into office at all during these dark times, the Democratic Party has been forced to play along. The players have been more or less reluctant depending on how susceptible they are to the lure of investment income.

Step one was to vilify government. Step two was to elect officials who would make government ineffective. The GOP called for unity above all else. There were plenty of disaffected constituencies that could be pulled together with promises to address their particular grievances. Most people have a jaundiced view of the government because, right or left, we've all been let down in one way or another. Find the right framing and you can create party loyalists for life.

At first, the proponents of trickle-down economics may actually have believed their silly theory that increased economic activity would follow when taxes on the top brackets got smaller, and that this would generate the needed revenue. If they really did think that, it wasn't for long. The real long-term goal was to consolidate private wealth and make it the dominant force in government policy. The rich wanted to get richer. It's only natural. Give them the freedom due to all people created equal. Let them use that freedom to become emperors. Equality under the law is a fairy tale you use to get poor people to fight your wars for you.

Modern media made it increasingly difficult to operate the government to the advantage of concentrated wealth without any scrutiny at all. Occasionally, idealistic principles won a round. Overall, however, the trend has been toward feeding money upward and hardship downward, flogging the tired myth of upward mobility to a more and more jaded audience.

Part of the audience has been dragging student debt for years, because a college education was supposed to be a necessary rung on that upward climb, as well as just a nice thing to have for your own intellectual expansion. The encumbrance became a drag on the economy as those workers were less and less able to participate fully in the consumerist gorge that sustains the modern world. While the gorge is itself a major threat to our survival as a species, it remains necessary to the individuals of each generation as they try to extract sustenance from the world they're thrust into. So the current administration in the US decided to extend to the student debt bloc as a whole -- or at least in large part -- the same courtesy extended to major corporations and allied nations, of just writing it off. Let the liberated wallets frolic among the retailers, the real estate market, and the service sector.

The opposition refused to see the student debt population as a large blockage in the national cash flow, and instead continued to see them as little people who needed to live with their mistake of seeking higher education that didn't pay off adequately. Hey, we've all made bad investments! Suck it up! They haven't noticed yet that student debt forgiveness is the perfect metaphor for their plan to shrink the government and drown it in a bathtub. I will explain:

Cutting taxes was supposed to make voters automatically favor politicians who cut government expenses. They've tried, but certain expenses are very hard to reduce, and other categories attract the support of lobbyists to keep the money flowing. Penurious voters keep sending angry representatives to Congress, hoping for the glorious day when the IRS finally falls like a statue of Saddam Hussein, and everyone gets to take home ever dollar they earn. But it keeps not happening! Meanwhile, economists look over their glasses at us and tell us that this deficit thing is going to keep two, three, twenty, a hundred generations enslaved just to the interest payments!! We have reached the point now where a functional percentage of voters might be convinced that the best way out of the mess is just to collapse the government and walk away from the wreckage. It's a young adult fantasy novel come to life. John Galt and his rich buddies hang out in their luxurious compounds waiting to stride out over their newly conquered world after convincing the majority of underlings that democratic government is just too complicated and difficult for them. Y'all couldn't handle the expenses. And yet those expenses miraculously disappear once the nanny state is replaced by the boss state.

I'm not sure where the super rich think their wealth will come from once they have all the money. Huge dollar figures will become even more meaningless than they are already. The key becomes an economy based on job satisfaction rather than money. Tyrants need jobs done. Individuals need intellectual and emotional gratification. And because gratification is itself an emotion, it's all about emotion. Feelings, nothing more than feelings. Put sadistic bastards in charge of security. You don't have to pay them anything. Just make sure that they have the equipment they want, and whatever food, shelter, and company they require to keep them happily on task. Find workaholic drudges for your necessary tasks. Find sycophantic suckups to be your property caretakers and household retainers. There are endless ways to create a barter economy from tendencies already easy to see among people now handled through the cumbersome intermediary of pay rates. Still, the super rich will have to measure themselves against each other somehow. Oh well, I guess that's their problem to solve. We too dumb down here.

The leakiness of Gmail

 When I signed up for Gmail many years ago, you had to be invited by an existing user. My colleague Ralph extended that credential, after which I could invite myself to open more accounts.

The address format specified characters.characters@gmail.com. It was case sensitive and the dots mattered. Then, a few years later, I started receiving emails definitely not addressed to me. Up in the address field was a note from the googs stating "yes, this is you," with a link to explanation. Addresses were no longer case sensitive and dots didn't matter. Thus I would receive email addressed to anyone using the same characters I had used, upper or lower case, dots or no dots. But it's selective. I don't receive every email my doppelgangers get. Their inboxes can't be that sparse unless they ruthlessly prune their contact lists. 

I get snapshots of multiple lives. I even get spam based on their history and preferences. And they're a diverse group. At least two appear to be Black women. One seems to be a southern guy. Someone owns or used to own a Jeep. I've learned some interesting things about California's ecology, the blues music scene in Los Angeles, and The Roosevelt Institute, as well as dental and hair care schedules, notifications about routine automobile service, and the cosmetic products marketed to certain demographics. I even get emails from school administrators to parents, and internal business communications from people I don't know. These are not phishing scams. These are other people's business, delivered to me. Some seem to come and go randomly. Others appear regularly, even daily.

I wonder what they might see from my inbox?

While the experience has been interesting in a way, it's also annoying that Gmail made no effort to secure my communications or those with whom I share my initials. It's a good reminder that most communication on the Internet is not secure. It can be made somewhat more secure by taking specific steps that cost money, but in any case we are submitting our information to a sprawling global system of computers entirely owned by other people. Commit your information accordingly.

Give up and put your clothes back on

 Here in New Hampshire we have reached the time of year when the house is never warm, but the weather isn't cold enough to justify running the heat. This will fade directly into the time of year when the house is never warm, even with the heat on. Glorious summer had its chance, and decided mostly to skip us this year. I'm not sure where it did show up, but it didn't book a long stay in New England.

In a typical year, May is full of promise and June is full of disappointments. Daylight doesn't automatically mean sunshine. Without sunshine, the relative warmth doesn't bake into your pasty, pale body in shorts and a tee shirt to compensate for the months you've waited. But then July seems to flip a switch. The heat lamp comes on and you can forget the other three-quarters of the year, two-thirds of it with leafless trees. If we're lucky, we get cool nights for sleeping and just hot enough days to enjoy the lakes and mountains. That's the image that everyone carries, anyway. Even before the climate really started to skid out of control, driven by people drunk with power and money, New England's weather had a well earned reputation for variability. You can't always get what you want, even if you're sure you remember it that way.

This summer was an endless June. Frequent rain, some of it so heavy that it caused destructive flooding, gave way only briefly to sunny days before the next batch of clouds arrived. We didn't see more than a moment of excessive heat, but nighttime temperatures were warm, and dew points high. We waited through what seemed like unending tepid gooeyness for brief visits of drier warmth. And now it's over. Daylight slips below twelve hours, soon to plunge faster and faster toward its low point three months away. The sun's angle drops to a stabbing glare when it shows at all.

If we lived in the tropics, the length of day wouldn't vary and the sun would always arc high overhead. A friend who lived in Ecuador for a couple of years said that you could choose your temperatures by changing your elevation. But forget the short, light nights of summer in more northerly latitudes. Forget long twilights, too. So we ride around the millions of miles of orbit ahead of us to get to our next shot at the light and warmth we hope for.

Every season has its attractions. I see people getting excited for autumn's cooler temperatures, bright foliage, and signature flavors. Some are also planning happily for the best of winter, that other highly weather dependent season. Another casualty of climate change, winter could easily turn out to be cold, dark, wet, and nothing more. In that case, there's always hot beverages and baked goods. But just the right  amount of usable snow for a couple or three months would be better for the economy and the scenery. And you'd still have hot beverages and baked goods. So go find the appropriate layers to wear for the moment and face the future.

Remembering 9-11 22 years later

 On 9-11-2001, Americans were stunned and highly offended when, after decades of meddling in other countries and destabilizing them with impunity for our own gain, someone had finally succeeded in attacking and destabilizing ours.

September 11th was a day of horror and heroism, when the few Americans suddenly thrust into the jaws of history met certain death with a sense of duty and service to their fellow citizens, while the rest of us had to watch helplessly. The passengers on Flight 93 and the first responders in New York engaged directly. No doubt the military and intelligence services were busy, but without concrete action they could take. The wider audience could only devour what news we could get, and wonder what would be next.

The recollection of great national unity is a myth. On September 12th I walked into my favorite coffee shop to find people shouting at each other over what country to bomb first. Anyone vaguely resembling a Muslim had a target on them. The culture of xenophobia got a surge of nutrients on which it still feeds.

In many ways, 9-11-01 brought us 11-8-2016. Predictably, we had our chance to be thoughtful and measured in our response, and ran off shooting instead. The architects of the attack knew this about us. While just under 3,000 people died in the attacks themselves, the death toll resulting worldwide is in the millions. Someone needed to die for what “they” had done to us, and it almost didn’t matter who.

Suicide bombers are not noble and heroic. They represent a sickness in the human psyche that comes out not just in spectacular events like 9-11, but in every sad and maddening murder suicide, whether it’s in a small apartment and barely makes the evening news, or a school or shopping mall or house of worship that triggers thoughts and prayers from sanctimonious politicians who intend to do nothing more.

It was never too soon to look inward and reflect on what the 9-11 attacks could tell us about our position and influence in the world, and it’s not too late, although it is too late for the casualties of our long wars since then. We learn to fit ourselves together in the finite space of this planet or we destroy it all in the battle for dominance.

A Dose of Strangers

As dusk settles on a day I've spent indoors, I get restless, looking out the windows at the darkening forest, even if I've spent the day doing useful or creative things. I recall the convenience of living in my grubbiest apartment, nicknamed The Slum, in the Eastport section of Annapolis. It's the only time I feel the faintest twinge of dissatisfaction at living surrounded by nature.

There was a shopping center, my bank, and a post office within a block or two. My commute to work was a five-minute bike ride or a fifteen-minute walk to a poorly paid factory job in a sail loft. I could get home from work in minutes.

Knee trouble had knocked me out of bike racing in the spring that year, so I didn't have the distraction of thinking that I needed to train. That freed up a lot of time. Juggling a couple of unsuccessful love affairs chewed up a few weekends at either end of the summer, but once I got bounced from those I had my evenings and weekends to myself.

My roommate was a racing buddy who had lured me into splitting the rent after his own previous cohab had taken him for a few hundred dollars and departed. Then, during the winter, he moved in with a woman in another apartment complex, where they could actually afford to pay for heat, so my solitude deepened with winter's advancing chill. We had made a pact never to turn on the electric baseboards, and I held to it. I was getting into winter camping anyway.

The living room was furnished with a few shabby pieces and several bicycles. My roomie left his bikes because his new girlfriend didn't have room in her cozy dwelling. The place was poorly lit after dark, the off-white paint of the living room walls horizontally striped in dashes made by the Velox handlebar plugs of four bikes that rested against them. The floor was dark wood. The ceilings were fairly high, although the architecture of the buildings was boxlike and uninspired. It was a great place to go out from, in search of light, life, and possible companionship.

Companionship is a distant ship, a welcome sight when it first comes over the horizon, but menacing in its anonymity as it draws closer. What flag is that? Who looks over the rail as faces become more distinct? The idea seemed nice. Why spoil it with actual experience? I could easily walk to the center of town, to enjoy the bustle of other people's lives while they obligingly showed no interest in mine. I might go to the infant Ram's Head Tavern, when it was a basement dive offering a galaxy of unusual imported and domestic beers, or I might just walk and walk, sitting for a time on different benches, laying out the map of the city based on all that I could hear.

I'd started the practice of walking to town right after college, when I returned to Annapolis after graduation. Annapolis was both familiar and unfamiliar, because of the way my family had come and gone from it over and over during my father's Coast Guard career. I walked from West Annapolis at that point, a bit farther, but a pretty walk, between the Naval Academy and St. John's College campuses, or, often, across the St. John's campus. During firefly season, the walks were enchanted by millions of tiny lights. It was on those walks that I started laying out the sound map, realizing how much of the area I could place spatially from any point.

I would log miles on my evening walks, without thinking about it. Walking is a great way to stimulate creativity and relaxation. Driving facilitates sloth, which can be mistaken for relaxation, but walking provides rhythm, exercise, and flow through the scenery. So does biking, but walking is often a better choice. Especially during the times when I was spending most of my time on the latest draft of my bad novel, or other creative efforts that kept me in a chair for hours, the ability to redeem the day with an evening walk was not only a great amenity, the walk itself was an opportunity to observe other lives and fit these snippets into current or future works. I called it a dose of strangers.

I do have a few dear friends, some of whom I might actually hear from occasionally. I didn't have anything against meeting people, I'm just not very good at it. So, playing to my strengths, I was content to observe, tending to any close passage with a courteous nod and a smile. I did try to kindle something with the young woman who worked the evening shift in a cool bookstore on Main Street, but she deflected the advance. That was still something to file away for possible fictional use, as was everything in those days. I would go home and write for hours before nodding off. Then the alarm would pull me up to crawl from the deep seaweed of fatigue in search of coffee and whatever the day had in store.

In my childhood, my father would go for drives after supper. Like a favorite dog, I would be invited along a lot of the time. But after the gasoline shortages of the 1970s made it obvious to me that petroleum was not something to squander, I wasn't going to drive aimlessly even if I had a car. So here I am now, with a choice between groping in the forest among creatures adapted not only to function but to prey in the dark, or to walk along the road, where hotrodders like to manufacture rubber smoke, and drinkers fling their empties, their driving precision not to be trusted. I don't want to be a lone figure in the headlights even if the oncoming or overtaking motorist is totally sober and sedate. This is doubly true of biking. The advantage of the city was that I could see and be seen without being unusual. And at the time Annapolis had little street crime. There was little to fear.

Hiking is grand. I love to hike. But my night vision was never great, and now it's worse, so I'm reluctant to bumble into a bear or accidentally drop kick a skunk while I'm fumbling around in the dark. And even though I know that coyotes are an asset and don't habitually attack humans, when they sing out nearby it still makes my hair stand up. I'm not going for a walk in the dark. I'll have to come up with something else. Or, as usual, peck idly at this or that until I notice that it's almost midnight and I should have gone to bed hours before.

Kids today...

 Skimming an article online from NPR, about two middle school girls who have a podcast about what it's like to be a middle schooler today, one thing stood out: active shooter drills.

When I was in the middle school years, the Vietnam War and racial tension stressed the country. As a military dependent, I knew a lot of kids who worried about losing a father. Outside of that circle, with the draft in full operation, I knew kids who worried about losing a brother. Hanging over all of this was the threat of nuclear war. None of us as young children had any idea what might trigger it, but we all knew that it would be much more abrupt and far reaching than the start of any other war in human history. But it was abstract. When a kid lost a family member to the war in Southeast Asia, it was on the other side of the world. Their loss was real, but the carnage took place off stage.

For the past thirty years or so, school children have had to prepare more and more for the carnage to erupt in the middle of their lives. With gun laws that are not only lax but openly supportive of the rights of the homicidal, the United States is a breeding ground for grievance murderers. Most of it happens piecemeal, in domestic violence or street crime. Applying the logic used around air crashes, you never hear about the thousands of schools that go year after year without a mass shooting. You only hear about the spectacular disasters. We're just supposed to accept the possibility. Could happen. Probably won't. And hey: your odds of survival are way better in a school shooting than in an airliner crash. Do your drills and keep your wits about you if the shooting actually starts. You fall to the level of your training, kids!

Mass shootings are not limited to schools, of course. Any public gathering could become a target range for some heavily armed, sad, angry person ready to let it rip. They might or might not be suicidal themselves. Often they have no intention of surviving, or at least don't expect to.

Death hovered near us in other ways in the 1960s and '70s. Schoolmates might lose a parent to cancer or a car crash. We might even lose a schoolmate to cancer or a car crash. One kid I knew drowned in a swimming pool. Those still apply today. The unlikely but far from impossible threat of a nuclear fireball (I spent a lot of school years near DC) has been replaced by the fairly unlikely but too-often repeated scenario of a mass murderer dropping by, in addition to the daily hazards. Does it make it harder or easier to take that you might be chopped to pieces by little bits of flying lead while a nearby friend manages to evade it? It's not even combat. You're being hunted by a wasteful killer with nothing but blood lust.

In the meantime, you have to worry about whether you look sufficiently fashionable to avoid ridicule, and hope that you don't do anything that will get you plastered all over the internet for decades of unanswerable humiliation. And an older generation grumbles constantly about your flaws.

A town too small to be good

Nationally and at the state level, some of the bad actors of politics and government are facing some consequences for verifiable and legally actionable corruption, as opposed to just batting away rumors and accusations in the shouting match that has kept us from enacting the sound, progressive policies that might actually create and maintain a pleasantly livable world for the children and grandchildren of those who decided to reproduce from the 1980s onward.

Little rays of hope shine into the gloom of the future. Will high profile criminals and traitors actually be indicted, tried, and convicted? Stay tuned. Will we actually start to deal with the climate crisis? Will we finally get an actual system of universal health care based on patient outcomes rather than corporate income? Will we go back to trying to accept each other's peculiarities rather than trying to eradicate them? Will we rein in rampant gun violence? Will we shine a light on corruption and waste where it actually occurs, rather than scapegoating social programs? It could happen. The US government and many state governments have strong enough constitutions and agencies to be able to enforce higher standards if the right people have the political will.

Some states are going the opposite way. The factions that have seized power are determined to hold it regardless of the naive notion of citizen government. But even there, a determined political opposition can maneuver against authoritarian takeover. They might even succeed. And states are big enough to attract national media attention. There are a lot of eyes on the big battles that define who we are as a nation.

Meanwhile, way down at the small town level, it's hard to find out what's going on. Here in New Hampshire, the state does little oversight of town governments. The smaller the town, the less money they have, and the less attention they attract. If corruption becomes the norm, no one will stop it if it becomes normalized. Cronyism, incompetent officials, revenge enforcement can go on unchecked because no one cares.

Correction: a minority of residents and voters cares, but small New England towns are direct democracies. Funny, that, because the conservative residents sneeringly tell you that "we live in a republic, not a democracy," and then go vote directly at town meeting on every issue, with absolutely no filter of elected representatives. Democracy, baby. In fact, it's damn near communistic. We all get together and decide how much money we need, compare it to how much money we actually have or can get, and figure out a budget.

You'd think it would be quite transparent, but town meeting is once a year. After that the select board and whatever professional town management you've scraped up the money for will be free to act autonomously, even exceeding budgeted amounts when a need is immediate. Sure, citizens can go to weekly select board meetings, but you have little leverage between elections. There is no debate among a regularly meeting body of legislators. The select board is all executive branch, with no checks and balances.

The winner of any election at this level is the person that gets the most votes. It is a pure popularity contest, like Prom King and Queen. If the majority of voters who show up prefers someone unqualified, or perhaps two or three of them in the course of a couple of elections, that's who will be running your town and setting your tax rate. It's a recipe for bad roads, environmental degradation, graft, and waste.

The American belief in the homespun common sense of country folk is generally complete bullshit. The same kinds of people tend to seek power at any level: the ones who see something in it for themselves and their friends. Where progressives try to broaden the basis of prosperity and acceptance to include more categories of minority, conservatives look out for their own people; the good people; the normal people; their kin and friends. And rural people are generally conservative.

It makes sense. People live closer to the real processes of survival in rural areas. They're more likely to have raised the animals that they later eat, or to have hunted a wild one, killed it, and prepared it for consumption. They raise crops, build and fix their own dwellings. The ones without generational wealth really do live close to that image of self reliance, insofar as anyone is self reliant. We all have to trade our skills or lend a hand, or get a hand, from time to time. A life like that makes a person calculate the cost and benefit of most actions. Unfortunately, at a governmental level -- even a dinky one like a town of a few hundred people without a true town center -- their calculations can lead to false economy, or to a few (thousand) bucks of town revenue going to a favored partner in an untraceable transaction.

It's not really untraceable. It's just that there is no real oversight unless enough townsfolk pay enough attention all the time, and still manage to overcome the loyalties of the close-knit group that benefits the most from keeping things vague and "good enough." In tiny towns, elections can come down to a single vote. Who are you going to complain to? First you have to untangle what happened. Then you have to make a case to have it investigated. At any level, your neighbors and your notoriously parsimonious state government will do their own cost benefit analysis and decide whether it's worth imperiling their own uneasy peace with neighbors or expending public funds to root out this one example of the kind of fiscal shenanigans that are probably found wherever you care to look.

I've lived here through an era of bad roads, no land use ordinances, and a really disgusting town trash dump. I saw it improve gradually. Now it's on the way down again. There's no one to tell, when even the rural news media know whose side they're on. The average citizen is just trying to earn a living and rest up from one work day to the next. We don't have time or resources to ride herd constantly on our public officials. I guess we're just really lucky that all of our town bridges are fairly new now, and none of the spans are very long. As for the rest of the roads, get ready for a bumpy ride. And don't be surprised at anything that gets built next door to you.