Terrorizing a nation is expensive

 Terrorism depends on emotional impact. The 9-11 attacks killed a tiny fraction of the total population of the United States, but drove a precision chisel into divides in the country, starting the fractures that led us to two costly wars and the election disasters of 2016 and 2024.

With an authoritarian government in place in the United States, we now have government forces terrorizing US citizens under the pretext of terrorizing "illegal immigrant criminals." They're on a rampage in Minnesota, focused mainly on the Twin Cities area, after a summer that included a shock raid in Chicago that could have come from a movie script. Remember that Donald Trump comes from reality television, and Steve Bannon made his money in the movie business. It's all show biz to them. Coincidentally, terrorism is all show biz, too.

Terrorism is performance art. It's guerrilla theater. It's improv in the wild, only it's not improvised by its writers. It's only improvised by the unwitting characters in the general public or target population who have the situation sprung on them.

Despite having an enormous budget and now asking for more money, and hiring anyone from 18 to 80 who is willing to buy their own tactical kit and pepper spray old ladies and school kids, ICE can't put big touring companies in more than one or two cities at a time. The expense goes beyond money to personnel. A goon squad needs goons. While humanity seems to produce an endless supply of people who like to be mean to other people, they're still a small enough percentage that the Department of Homeland Security will soon have to hire people who have to get their parents to drop them off at work.

All of this malicious incompetence comes at a cost to taxpayers. You, the average citizen, are paying all of the budget for ICE to commit acts of brutality without fear of penalty or pushback. Their funding was specifically secured in the One Big Bucket of Bullshit reconciliation bill the Republicans managed to shoehorn through last summer.

The Republican members of congress aren't spineless, they're complicit. Republican voters: is this really what you voted for? In some cases, I'm sure it is. But the rest of you: even if you long to live as the privileged class under apartheid, don't you realize that the strategies of xenophobia and isolation are demolishing your precious American exceptionalism? Even without the Toddler-in-Chief stomping his feet because he didn't get a Nobel Prize, the rest of the administration has the foreign policy plans of a 12-year-old. At best they're led by Stephen Miller, who hasn't evolved spiritually and intellectually since high school. He was a nasty piece of work then, and now he has years of experience. They have not mellowed him.

Stephen Miller is another chickenhawk playing toy soldier with other people's lives. Never served a day, but he's all about "might makes right" when it comes to sending other people's kids to pick fights on behalf of white nationalism.

At Davos this week, where America once held considerable influence, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out a plan in which the United States is left to devour itself with petty squabbles while the rest of the world moves on to outgrow the era of superpowers. The US was described as the last superpower in the 1990s, even as a "hyperpower" because it was the apparently victorious survivor of the Cold War. Drunk with power, the country has lurched through the decades since, believing its own hype to the point that ignorant voters were convinced to hollow out and undermine the bipartisan structure created after World War II to facilitate peace and prosperity through diplomacy and global trade.

And now the neo-Nazis who can't get over their side losing the second world war have merged with the white supremacists who couldn't get over losing the American Civil War to throw us back into the hostile and destructive worlds of the 19th and 20th centuries. They'll squander as much of your money as they can to lift up the worst elements of racist government and suppression of labor. Labor is most of us. The myth of upward mobility is that there's always room at the top. The myth of meritocracy is that the best people always rise. The truth is that there's only so much room for middle management. The bulk of us will always be down in the massive pile of the lower part of the pyramid, carrying the load of all of the pretensions of the few rich and powerful manipulators acting out their disparate fantasies of how the world should be to suit themselves

It's the economy, stupid. But fixing things is expensive.

 Bill Clinton sailed into office in 1992 on a well-timed wave of hope that his administration would pull us out of the Reagan-Bush recession. It was the first Baby Boomer presidency, and we were the generation that could have whatever it wanted. Our parents had told us so, and the economy of the 1960s and much of the 1970s had revolved around indulging us.

Clinton's campaign promised us, among other things, universal healthcare. Still waiting on that, Billy. And I know it isn't Bill's fault per se, but the Clinton administration's party bus ran into a serious roadblock with the corporate elements that had bought into his campaign based on...I'm not sure what. Maybe they just sensed that the electorate was ready to kick the old fogies out, so they rolled with the change, confident that they could tighten the screws financially the way they always had. And they were right.

Meanwhile, I've long had my own theories about why the economy improved when it did, none of which hinge on the Clinton administration's vast economic acumen. I think it was going to happen anyway: Consumers like to consume, and they'd finally freed up their credit enough after the 1980s binge to start doing it again. So Bill: right place, right time, right message, happy accident. It was the economy. And it was stupid. But it was fun for a while.

If Al Gore had prevailed in 2000, he would probably have presided over the economic belly flop, because that was a product of consumer exuberance and technological hubris uncontrollable by the Fed or any business regulation. Also, the Republican Congress under Gingrich was energetically undermining stability and social cohesion.

Social cohesion is important for a sustainable economy and environment, but it is not profitable in the short term. Certain ideologies object to it as well, because of principles of philosophical purity. They can't let us all get along, because not all of us deserve to get what they claim for themselves.

We will never address the fundamental problems facing humanity if we keep going from election to election looking just at grocery, fuel, childcare, and rent/mortgage prices. But you can't neglect those if you want to get elected. Sure, the Republicans in particular have exploited fear issues, mostly related to race mixing and crime by furriners. But we're seeing now how the economic stuff is getting ready to gnaw on their posteriors, even as they're thrilling their xenophobic base with immigrant roundups, concentration camps, and deportations.

The big trick after getting elected is staying elected. Any administration that tries to start working on essential issues like climate change and environmental protection in general will take heat from the right wing media, and some on the left as well. A subset of people are not driven by simple economics, but the majority feel better when things seem to be improving. Nearly everyone succumbs to normalcy bias when things are going outright well. So there's an ideal level of diminishing discomfort that promotes a willingness to embrace change. Unfortunately, the benefits of some of what needs to be done will not fit neatly into a two-year election cycle.

The House of Representatives and the President are more closely linked than the Senate is to either one. Because there will be a midterm election in each presidential term as well as the ones in which the presidency is up for grabs itself, it destabilizes the power of the executive. And a shaky president can loosen the grip of representatives who get bounced by disgruntled voters who want to whack somebody for how they're feeling.

Try enacting higher taxes on the wealthy, or pushing through real health care reform that sidelines the insurance companies and centers patient care and doctors' integrity within less than a two-year window, because the campaigning starts within months after the last election. You not only have to get it in place, it needs to show clear benefits, while corporate media and right wing influencers are telling everyone that it won't work and will destroy their entire way of life.

After trying to breathe in the deluge of conflicting information dumped on them, voters wind up settling for the promise of cheaper gas and groceries. Life may be long or short, but it's always one day at a time. But we're running out of days for the thornier issues.

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.

Burdened by the bullshit of Thomas Jefferson

 "When the public fears their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears its people, there is liberty." 

Snappy, right? Punchy. Memorable. And so true. What a genius.

The first premise is true. A government that rules by fear must back it up with violence and repression. But the second part oversimplifies the relationship and validates anarchy and lawlessness in which the people end up fearing each other. Unity is lost. Democracy is lost. Faith in government is lost. The nation defaults to tyranny as the void is filled by ambitious, opportunistic leaders.

The mess we are in now is the direct result of the 1980 Reagan campaign undermining the legitimacy of government. Generations since have been trained to be contemptuous of government.

The Reagan administration was full of shit, using their anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric to round up voters disillusioned by the mistakes of the Vietnam era and constantly paranoid from decades of the Cold War. All they really wanted was to make rich people richer. And they had no strong objection to racism and homophobia as long as those sentiments continued to bring them a reliable voting base. But the main objective was always wealth concentration.

Government that served the people broadly cost too much money that the rich could spend more wisely on more real estate, and whatever gratified them personally. This includes high profile philanthropy as well as gaudy, shameful ostentation like gold toilets. The underlying premise was that rich people were the elite. They deserved all the money they could attract and were free to spend it as they wished. Their expenditures would magically create jobs and prosperity as the money dripped from their fingers with every wave of the hand.

Every young person who gets their first job learns about taxes. They sign on for X-amount per hour, and then their check is a lot smaller than the product of simple multiplication. Stuff gets taken out. Once a year, you have to take a math test to get some or all of what was withheld refunded to you. Often, they get this first job while they're still in school, perhaps struggling with math, as I did. It doesn't seem fair, especially when you learn that the more you earn, the higher percentage of your income goes to taxes. Whaaat? The more I make the more you get? Fuck you! The concept of progressive taxation takes too many words. What do you mean when you say that the businesses that generate income also burden the public and should pay for services? Huh?

Then there are the other deductions. To a young worker, Social Security seems remote. The money deducted for that doesn't get refunded the way overpaid taxes do. The return on it sits too far off to seem justifiable when you could use that money now. It's easy to believe various charlatans who assure you that you could make far more playing the market with private retirement investments. Forget volatility and untimely market corrections. Don't ask how the brokerages make their cut. You'll do great! Just keep the government off of everyone's back. The great Thomas Jefferson said that the government is supposed to fear the people. Keep them on the back foot! They're the enemy.

Bumper sticker philosophy rules public opinion. A popular one says, "Become ungovernable." This glorification of immature oppositional defiance strikes at the foundation of our constitutional system, but it sounds so damn cool. Yeah! Ungovernable! Don't tread on me! I'm a badass!

Jefferson is also credited with saying that the roots of the Tree of Liberty need to be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants from time to time. This was written at a time when the meat on your plate at supper might have been walking around your farm that morning, and you might have slit its throat yourself. Human history is drenched in blood. At least the cause of liberty is a worthy use of the violent death in conflict that you might face anyway at the whim of a king or emperor. It was also written when war on a global scale was held back by the transportation and weapon technology of the time.

After World War II, the survivors of that conflict all seemed to agree that we didn't want to do that again. We've had almost constant warfare since then, but on a smaller scale. Hard to say how the score sits between the tyrants and the patriots. But we do know a lot more about post traumatic stress disorder and how to reconstruct physically maimed people. So there's that.

Regardless of the political labels, elected representatives have to deal with the details when they enact policies that will affect the entire operation of the country. They put lives at risk in the military and intelligence services. They kill or save millions inside and outside of our borders. Every two years, the voters kick the table and open the door to strong winds that blow the papers around. They base their decisions on whatever they can hold in mind about the people they're voting for and the beliefs they represent. A lot of them skip it altogether and hope for the best.

If fear is valued, fear will be cultivated. If the choice is only between a government fearing its people or a people fearing their government, we will only live in a constant climate of fear. That doesn't lead to good decisions.