Tariffs are the key to happy taxpayers

 No one loves to pay their taxes, but the right wing is particularly responsive to the lure of tax cuts. For the rich, this gratifies their lust to be richer and richer and richer. The majority of tax cuts go to them. In return, they fund the election campaigns that recruit the small fry who will get a token markdown from time to time.

For the small fry, hatred of income taxes stems largely from their dislike of doing math. Underfunding education serves a key function in this. Not only does it appease the cheapskates to cut a major cost like schools, it also creates generation after generation of voters who will leap at a promise of tax cuts because they never learned how the system works.

No one likes sales taxes, either. You see a price, you go to check out, and blammo: you have to pay more. This is where tariffs are the ingenious solution to all of that.

Do away with income and sales taxes. People get to take home all of their pay. Maybe retain the deduction for Social Security and Medicare for a while... but for the most part, what you see is what you get, and the ticketed price on any item is what you pay. However, the price of any item has been jacked up by the tariff amount. It's an invisible tax. A loaf of bread might be $25. A car might cost a hundred grand. But the price is the price, and you never have to do extra math. Everything will cost a lot more. People won't really be better off financially. Probably worse, in fact, especially because tariffs and sales taxes always hit lower income people harder than they hit the rich. But it won't matter, because "other countries are paying."

Republican mouthpieces are already crowing on social media about the billions that the current regime has raked in from tariffs. As long as they can keep a significant percentage of people believing that tariffs bring in money from outside the country, and that the resulting inflation is somehow the fault of the opposing political party, they can rule over a happy populace in their "tax free" paradise.

Rental rabbit hole

 It wasn't a rabbit hole so much as a nostalgia well. I read an article about ridiculously high rents contributing to homelessness among people with full time jobs. I started thinking of my all-too-brief slum-dwelling days before I let my doting Dad entice me back into the family home because he was frightened and grossed out by the apartment I could barely afford on my full-time wages.

This wasn't last week or last year, or even last decade. It was 44 years ago. The problem of "workforce housing" has been going on far longer than it's been a trendy buzz phrase among planners, politicians, and sociologists. Homelessness was already getting bad then. It's gotten steadily worse.

I rented apartments in Gainesville, Florida, from the fall of 1976 to the spring of 1979. I moved three times, once within the same complex, then to another complex closer to campus and a big grocery store. For one summer during college I was essentially homeless in Miami, couch surfing and sleeping in my car while I worked my summer job, after arrangements proposed by a high school friend fell through. Another summer I rented an apartment with two other people in Orlando, while working for The Mouse. Then there was a summer where I bunked in the half-furnished attic of the family's new home (new to them, built in the 1920s) in Annapolis, and one where I just stayed at school. Throughout that time, I had a general idea of apartment rents based entirely on the scale of a state university town in a state that never has to deal with frost heaves and snow removal. 

After graduation, I based the housing portion of my meager budget on those impossibly friendly numbers. I had moved back to Annapolis in pursuit of job leads that proved to be mirages, before settling into grunt jobs as a sailmaker, then a house painter, then a general maintenance dude at a yacht club. I wanted jobs that would be easy to leave when I took off on all of the boss bike tours I was going to take, and that wouldn't demand too much of my creative faculties, as I tried to launch a career of cartooning and writing. By Gainesville economics I should have been able to land something, but roommates are always a problem.

The Slum was a grubby but spacious box I rented with a bike racing and house painting colleague after I'd gone over into another sail loft job and he had started working seriously toward his goal to become a carpenter and contractor. We were so low budget that we did not run the heat in the winter. I slept in my pride and joy 5-below-zero sleeping bag on a mattress on the floor. He went and got a girlfriend who could afford utilities, leaving me to enjoy the comforts of our drafty castle and chip the frozen soap off of the soapdish for my morning showers.

It was a pleasant, monastic existence. I was a five-minute bike ride or a 15-minute walk from work. I could come home and work on my novel until about 10 p.m., when the lady upstairs would pound on the floor because my typewriter was too loud. Then I could read and revise until I nodded off. I had no car, no phone, no money, and, therefore, no social or sex life. Highly economical. If you wanted to become invisible, having no phone and no car was a great start.

 My roommate paid his rent until the lease ended. That left me unable to afford the place, minimal as it was. Goodbye, closet-size kitchen with an exhaust fan that would electrocute you when you tried to turn it off. Goodbye, living room furnished with a scratchy couch, beat-up coffee table, and four bicycles leaned up against the walls. Two were my roommate's. Girlfriend's place didn't have room for his fleet.

The place disgusted dear old Dad so much that he wouldn't even get out of his car when he came over to scoop me up and convey me back to the family homestead for a home-cooked meal. I would have to keep looking out the window toward the parking lot to see if his car was there. His choice. I could have biked over. I hadn't had my nasty night-riding crash yet. Not that that reformed me anyway... I just got better lights and a little more caution.

The other worker bees around me had various group living arrangements. Some of them just made more money, either with a partner equally better employed or as the senior financial partner. There were cheaper apartments further out of town or in certain more distant towns, but that would have meant getting a car and paying its attendant expenses.

Most of the blame falls to me for not majoring in something marketable as the 1980s loomed. Creative aspirations are an expensive luxury. I could have folded a lot sooner and gone into construction, or something like that, but I hadn't really liked the scream of circular saws, or the steady march of sprawl that was already starting to obliterate most of what made Annapolis nice. I kept making tiny advances as a writer, which lured me further and further into the cul de sac of failed dreams. But this failure has also given me first hand experience of the tenuous life of a low-level worker. I did climb into the lifeboat of the family home for a few years until those little breakthroughs selling articles and drawings combined with my first marriage to convince me to launch my own leaky dinghy and row away.

Twice, my first wife and I had rental houses sold out from under us, once in Annapolis, once in New Hampshire. We moved from the Annapolis rental house into a basement apartment not even fully separated from the house upstairs. The landlord was easy to get along with, but the place flooded during a heavy couple of storms, destroying among other things a lot of the pages of one of my journals. It doesn't have to be exquisitely crafted deathless prose. A journal is a writer's junk drawer from which occasionally emerge suddenly useful items.

We moved to New Hampshire in the summer of 1987 because I had taken a job with a startup outdoor magazine. The publisher started writing rubber paychecks before Christmas. The 1980s boom in New England was starting to crumble at that point. When the owners of our rental house put it on the market, we took a rental that included an obligation to work as farm help. Because I had lots of "free time," I ended up doing a lot of the work that was really more interesting to my wife, but her skills as a bookkeeper landed her a series of full-time jobs. She only got sexually harassed at one of them. I found a nice part time position as a copy editor for the local weekly paper, did some substitute teaching (my apologies, kids), and fell into another part time job at a bike and cross-country ski shop.

Rental properties were already hard to find in the late 1980s in this part of New Hampshire. The real estate boom had inspired a lot of people to sell their property. Speculators slapped up hastily-built, overpriced condos to suck in the newly affluent residents of Massachusetts, pulling in fat salaries in the tech boom that was about to bust. Those mostly clustered near feature attractions like mountains and lakes. Not exactly convenient to what remained of employment, and often still priced out of reach as overextended investors tried to cover their losses.

The house we finally bought was 576 square feet. Into it we packed two adult humans, two dogs, and a cat. This later expanded to two cats. When we divorced, we split the pets.

Various lucky breaks have left me with the home and land, but I couldn't afford to move anywhere else. And the house is bigger now, to accommodate the next life partner. Fortunately, I like where I am. On the way there, though, I was buried in credit card debt, and fully dependent on having someone with whom to split rents. We had to bum money from relatives and borrow from short-term lenders. Buried in credit card debt, on the hook to short term lenders, are classic elements in the setup for a self-help book from the 1980s. Shit like that was everywhere: "I was down and out and then I stumbled on this sure-fire way to a life of wealth and leisure! Just buy my book for $19.99 and you too can have a Porsche and a hot tub and endless vacations!"

I wonder how many get-rich-quick writers ended up in the financial dumpster because they couldn't compete in the crowded market of get-rich-quick books. Nowadays it's financial YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagramaticists.

I don't recommend that anyone do things the way I did, because my escape from the wheel was a unique accident. Because I didn't manage to turn the windfall into an investment bonanza or otherwise open the valve on the money pipeline, I'm back living paycheck to paycheck, more or less. I will certainly never retire, just die.

Barbara Ehrenreich published Nickel and Dimed in 2001. Since then, the income gap has become a canyon, and real estate as an investment has far outstripped the concept of real estate as a place to live. There are more than twice as many people in the United States alone than there were when I was born, and more than a hundred million more than when I went full time into the labor pool and housing market. That has an effect, no matter how much the cheerleaders for unlimited growth will insist that it does not. People wherever they are have to find occupations that attract enough money to pay livable wages, while the planet has to provide sufficient resources to feed them all, at the same time that the ecosystem continues to function to support us. Growth advocates have little value or respect for the natural world. Open space is "wasteland." Nature can take care of itself, or we'll devise some scientifically engineered, streamlined set of indispensable species and the others are free to die off. Except our knowledge doesn't advance nearly as fast as our need does.

Way back in the mid 20th Century, when we briefly acknowledged that there was a population problem, my answer was that we should slow down everyone's birth rate and focus on providing quality of life worldwide. Coast the population down to coexist with the complex machinery of nature, and use our technology to take the pressure off of every person as much as possible. Instead we got the winner-take-all fuckfest of the 1980s. We inherit the results of that now. My philosophy still holds; we just have to accommodate a much larger population from which to coast down.

Winning and losing and fighting dirty

 I've caught some chatter about Democrats pushing their elected representatives to fight more like Republicans. You know: dirty.

While Republicans are great at obstructionist politics, it's mostly because conservatism has really degenerated into nothing but obstructionism, combined with outright reversion to much uglier, less free, more violent past forms of our national and state governments. This is painted as some idealized, moral society of small town virtue and agricultural wholesomeness. It never existed, and its architects know that. They're just selling the fantasy of manly men and appreciative women to an audience hungry for a simpler moral landscape than reality ever provides. Conflict resolution goes from strong words to bare knuckles to six-guns. Might makes right.

Politicians lie. You have to filter for the percentage of lies, the persistence of the lies, and rhetorical goals of the lies. You have to vet the truth, too. It's hard, because a candidate for office, even if they're the incumbent, is asking you to believe that they will bring you what you want, when they haven't yet. And these better things have to be the result of a widespread cooperative effort among a majority of the elected officials. No single savior can do it, not even an imperial President.

The critical difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans only want their team to win, whereas Democrats want the whole country to win. The Republicans view their team as the only true Americans, while the Democrats have taken the position that the United States is a work in progress, evolving by absorbing a diverse population enjoying individual liberty responsibly in a cooperative endeavor to create a more perfect union.  

Each political party's vision of the future is quite different. Individual humans regardless of party affiliation are susceptible to human failings of greed, lust, and denial, but that doesn't mean that "both parties are the same." Horny Bill Clinton was not the same as horny Newt Gingrich when it came to governing philosophy.

Elections are sales campaigns. Politicians are service providers who carry out their jobs more or less constantly in the public eye. The House of Representatives is full of people you may never have heard of unless they do something stupendous or outrageous, but the voters of their districts mostly know who they are and what they do. Senators have higher profiles, because there are fewer of them. Thus we are all affected by the decisions of people we have no chance to vote for. We have no leverage except to appeal to their morality or intellect. And legislators among themselves have to negotiate constantly to make laws and otherwise fulfill their duties while remaining electable at home. When voters periodically heave a bunch of them out, the deal process has to start all over again.

Universal access to the same information, through broadcast media and the internet gives people in vastly different circumstances a deceptively uniform portrayal of the world outside their immediate surroundings. People collect in their echo chambers, but the chambers channel each other's messaging to stitch into the fabric of the tailored message to their followers. We argue in general about the same broad topics regardless of where we live. The issues might be real, but the life experience of the audience is not the same. Come election time, only the voters in each Congressional district get to vote for the politician who will carry their standard to DC to help make things better or worse for people who live in the myriad of other districts all over the country.

Democrats have an image problem that won't be solved by becoming more like Republicans. They tried that in the 1990s and ended up with more corporate influence as we got dragged further to the right. On the other hand, political power ultimately does originate in the voters. One could infer that the shift to the right reflected the overall character of the majority of voters. The key phrase there is "majority of voters." Especially in midterm elections, voter turnout represents less than half of registered voters in most states, sometimes much less than half. And that's only registered voters. Adults who are eligible to vote but don't register don't show up in statistics. But they do show up in the bitching and moaning.

Voting is a process of elimination. In an election where the winner has 52 percent and the loser has 48, 48 percent of the winning total just went to cancel out the loser's votes. The more people who actually show up and cast a ballot, the more accurately the results represent the beliefs of the adults in the district in question, whether it's local, state, congressional, senatorial, or presidential. The electoral college sucks, but it would matter a lot less if voters turned out en masse every time, and voted on more than a single issue or two. Voting can be discouraging when you don't see the improvements you were hoping for, or keep losing over and over because sports fan mentality has replaced critical thinking.

Meanwhile, elections have consequences. In Missouri, voters passed a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage and require sick leave. One and done, right? Wrong. The Republican legislature and governor decided that they rule over the mere voters, so they passed legislation reversing the decision. This is a pitfall of our representative democracy, when the elected officials decide that the disadvantaged minority they really answer to is rich donors. Voters install the officials, but the officials then have the power to implement the policies and laws under which ordinary citizens live. I would have said under which everyone lives, but we all see how the system goes lightly on prominent people. And legislators all too often exempt themselves as well.

Some Democrats are operating more aggressively, but it's a fine line between beating the other team at their own game and becoming as bad as they are. As Texas prepares to gerrymander their state even more aggressively to counter the losses Republicans expect in Congress as a result of their unpopular and destructive Big Steaming Pile of a Bill, California has floated the notion of redistricting to dilute republican power there, to counteract the expected shift in election results in the Lone Star State. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's only a battle tactic. The real winning strategy for the country as a whole would be a law requiring nonpartisan redistricting nationwide at all levels. Make politicians run on the issues, not on their party affiliation. Good luck getting that passed when so many members of Congress got there from gerrymandered districts, but we can dream.

In New York, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has run a thoughtful and energetic campaign to promote the ideas as well as the candidate, to put a human face on the bogeyman of a progressive Muslim vying to head the government of the most populous city in the United States. It's not fighting dirty at all. It's communicating intelligently. If the Democratic Party is going to turn the tide of authoritarianism being driven by the current degenerated state of the Republican Party, thoughtful communication will be at least as important as clever and hostile political maneuvers. Successful hostilities gratify party faithful, but they make genuine mutual understanding less and less possible. "They kill one of ours, we kill one of theirs..." This only creates two committed minorities, each incapable of winning a free and fair election on their own, fighting for the uncommitted voters increasingly turned off by both of them.

The Republicans were the good guys in the Civil War, but by the end of the 19th Century they had become the tools of plutocracy. Democrats notoriously presided over rigged towns like Chicago, and were the power behind Southern racist politics throughout most of the 19th Century, and well into the 2oth. General party characteristics of either side blend with local variations, so you have to pay attention to the details where you happen to be. Listen to what the candidates say. Pay attention to what they actually do when they get into office. Communicate often, in clear and constructive terms.

I hate talking to people, especially about politics and government. I would much rather take some time over a piece of writing than have to think fast on my feet, summoning up the examples I know someone will ask for. I greatly admire people who can do that and bring receipts. It's especially gratifying when those receipts will stand up to fact checking. Communicate in your preferred way.

The Americans who want to get us back on track to save the small-d democratic portion of our great republican government have no immediate choice but to back capital D Democrats in large numbers. We can sort the rest out later, but right now we're fighting the battle with the troops we have, and the weapons they bring. The system needs a reset to make Congress take its job seriously, make the courts independent again, and the President less of a quasi-monarch. We won't get there in one or two elections, but we won't ever get there if we don't take the first step. Vote for Democrats and then don't just release them into the wild. Stay on them and hold them accountable, as you would with anyone you hired to represent you. It's a nuisance and a pain in the ass, but it's the basis of the Constitution from which comes your beloved right to yap off and carry a gun. If they let you down, don't flip to the other party without checking out their plans thoroughly. Instead, vote in primaries, to refine the trajectory, not turn the gun on ourselves.

Indentured servitude for the poor

 Trump administration Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has proposed tapping into the "34 million able bodied Americans" on Medicaid to fill out the labor pool of agricultural workers drained by the mass deportation program masterminded by White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. This is forced labor. While it's a nice reality check on anyone in the working poor who likes to bitch about immigrants receiving public benefits, it also exploits a cycle of poverty in underpaid labor, largely for the benefit of corporate agriculture.

Tying health care financing to employment is already discriminatory. Tying it to specific employment further divides the workforce into haves and have-nots, as some get better "benefits" than others. Don't like your insurance plan? "Get a better job," say the cheerleaders for the free market, as if you could just skip merrily over to that more generous employer who surely exists somewhere.

Medicaid is not a cushy free ride. Neither is Medicare. Big gaps are left solely for the benefit of private insurance companies and skinflint tax-haters who think that depriving fellow citizens of essential services and gouging them for the supplemental coverage expresses some virtue in social Darwinism and the glorious profit motive. In their idealized vision, the magnificent labor herd runs, harried by wolves and cheetahs and lions that pick off the weak while strengthening the survivors. Some of us are obviously nearer the top of the food chain than others.

Moves by the MAGA government to consolidate power should not surprise anyone, but they should never elicit a yawn, either. The freedom and future of anyone alive today faces serious threats from the unholy alliance of the immensely wealthy, authoritarian religion, and tireless disinformation aimed at voters too busy pulling together a living to do a lot of comparative research about the news selected for their direction.

As for the conscripted workforce of low-income Americans, we're still talking about public money spent only to address part of a problem that could be solved by a more organized program of national service.

When we got rid of the military draft -- which was a very good decision -- we took away a shared rite of passage endured by young men for decades. The volunteer military functions much better than one filled with unenthusiastic conscripts. But it removes that direct connection to the nuts and bolts of citizen government and the responsibilities of maintaining the Land of the Free. I have thought for years that a broader based national service requirement, providing subsidized labor to a wide array of necessary functions like agriculture would create a sense of greater ownership of the general welfare of the nation. Programs like Americorps and the Peace Corps (and others) have functioned relatively invisibly to most of us. If they had the same level of public image that the military enjoys, and were coordinated into an admired and valued complete package of public services, we would create another whole category of veterans, hopefully less exposed to traumatic violence. As a species, we should be working toward phasing out the traumatic violence.

Such dreams will have to wait until we are no longer held under the rule of a regime that values traumatic violence and the threat of incarceration as tools to enforce order. Welcome to the Land of the Free and Obedient.