Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → robbing the public and spending irresponsibly

Thanks to Lynette Warren of No Treason! for plugging The Picket Line today. Lynette writes of her own project, saying in part:

I’ve gone fishin’. Instead of working 12 months/yr, I work about 5 months and my bottom line after taxes is amazingly close to what it was when I was working full-time. Many find that hard to believe. I was skeptical myself until I actually did it, but things have turned out well since I shrugged off nearly all my tax burden. Still, the most amazing thing to me about it is how few in number are the people who will even consider decreasing their gross income in order to increase their net hourly wage. My theory is that they just don’t want to know. They want to believe that 40 hours (plus overtime) of honest work will get them ethical treatment from the powers-that-be so they just won’t look at it.

It’s true that one of the delights of lowering my tax burden this year was that I effectively gave myself a raise. I was working much less, and so making less money overall, but I felt as though someone had given me a huge bonus combined with a multi-month sabbatical. I’ll feel even better in January when I can send away to the IRS for a complete refund of all of the money they took from me at the beginning of the year.

The typical American, according to Tax Foundation, spends more work days earning money for Congress than they do earning money for just about anything else in their budget:

How Long America Works to Pay Taxes in Days Compared to Major Spending Categories,
Calendar Year 2003
from: Tax Freedom Day

American taxpayers: For 74 days this year when you clock in, remind yourself who you’re doing it for.

Confounding President Bush’s pledges to rein in government growth, federal discretionary spending expanded by 12.5 percent in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, capping a two-year bulge that saw the government grow by more than 27 percent, according to preliminary spending figures from congressional budget panels.

As the April 15^th income tax filing deadline approaches, the news is full of stories about how our money is taken and spent.

Citizens Against Government Waste today announced the winners of the 2004 Oinkers — the silliest and worst examples of pork barrel spending from this year’s Pig Book.

This year’s total reveals that Congress porked out at record levels. For fiscal 2004, appropriators stuck 10,656 projects in the 13 appropriations bills, an increase of 13 percent over last year’s total of 9,362. In the last two years, the total number of projects has increased 28 percent. The cost of these projects in fiscal 2004 was $22.9 billion, or 1.6 percent more than last year’s total of $22.5 billion. In fact, the total cost of pork has increased by 14 percent since fiscal 2004. Total pork identified by Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) since 1991 adds up to $185 billion.

That’s $185 billion that was stolen from you and me and given away to campaign contributors or spent lavishly on reelection-related program activities.

It’s tax season, and in this particular game show, you can’t win, but thanks for playing, and here’s a copy of our home game. It’s the National Budget Simulation — and it allows you to make the hard decisions that Congress refuses to make (and then to see what effect this has on the deficit).

The monetary cost of the Iraq war continues to climb — about $150 million every day at last count — so don’t forget to add that into your budget (like Bush did).

If you want to dig down into the nitty-gritty and you trust the Congressional Budget Office, here are their numbers on who pays taxes (by income level) and how much, arranged in “tables [that] show effective tax rates for the four largest sources of federal revenues — individual income taxes, corporate income taxes, payroll taxes, and excise taxes — as well as the total effective rate for the four taxes combined. The tables also present average pretax and after-tax household income; counts of households; and shares of taxes, income, and households for each fifth (quintile) of the income distribution and the top percentiles of households.” Note that this doesn’t include most of the effects of the recent tax cuts.

The $119.4 billion, compiled by the White House Office of Management and Budget, is the administration’s most comprehensive tally of the war’s financial costs. Of the total, $97.2 billion has been for military operations, $21.2 billion for rebuilding Iraq’s economy and government, and $1 billion for U.S. administrative expenses there…
By the time the final Iraq figure for 2005 is in, American spending there could easily exceed $160 billion for 2003 through 2005. That would nearly double the combined costs, in today’s dollars, of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War.

In comparison, there was an article in the Economist about a gathering of economists, including multiple Nobel prize winners, to try to advise the world on where its money would be best spent when it comes to improving lives. They looked at policies designed to ameliorate problems with disease, sanitation, malnutrition, trade policy, climate change, and government and ranked these various policies as to which had the best bang for the buck. Number one on their list was a set of policies designed to prevent HIV/AIDS.

[A] package of preventive measures costing some $27 billion (in purchasing-power-adjusted dollars) over eight years would prevent nearly 30m new infections (reducing expected infections from 45m over the period to 17m).

Yup. For less than a quarter of what we’ve spent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq (population 25 million), we could prevent thirty million new cases of AIDS. But I’m sure you wouldn’t rather have Saddam back in charge.

And now for some more stories…

“There is no peace candidate in this race,” said Ashton Carter, a Defense Department official in the Clinton administration and now a senior Kerry adviser on military matters who helped craft the June policy speech. “No candidate who is a peace candidate ought to win.”
What if you’re an American soldier who is caught red-handed abusing or even killing prisoners of war? Quake in fear, soldier — for you might be subjected to “reprimands, fines, rank reductions, bars on Internet use and ‘Chapter 10’ agreements, which allow some soldiers who admit guilt to leave the military under less-than-honorable conditions but without being prosecuted.”
What’s happening with all of those billions of dollars being spent by the Iraqi occupation forces? The clearest overview I’ve seen yet is in Pratap Chatterjee’s The Thief of Baghdad.
There’s a second superpower challenging the might of the United States’ empire, says James F. Moore of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. This superpower is found on-line, and “demonstrates a new form of ‘emergent democracy’… How does the second superpower take action? Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the first day of the war against Iraq. By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small groups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same first day of the war. And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally.” Well, it’s a thought.

I keep harping on the sad fact that when it comes to important issues like U.S. belligerence, we might as well not have a functioning opposition party. It’s sad to note that when it comes to big government bloat the problem is the same.

Andrew Sullivan watched the Republican convention and notes:

[C]onservatism as we have known it is now over. People like me who became conservatives because of the appeal of smaller government and more domestic freedom are now marginalized in a big-government party, bent on using the power of the state to direct people’s lives, give them meaning and protect them from all dangers. Just remember all that Bush promised last night: an astonishingly expensive bid to spend much more money to help people in ways that conservatives once abjured. He pledged to provide record levels of education funding, colleges and healthcare centers in poor towns, more Pell grants, seven million more affordable homes, expensive new HSAs, and a phenomenally expensive bid to reform the social security system. I look forward to someone adding it all up, but it’s easily in the trillions. And Bush’s astonishing achievement is to make the case for all this new spending, at a time of chronic debt (created in large part by his profligate party), while pegging his opponent as the “tax-and-spend” candidate. The chutzpah is amazing. At this point, however, it isn’t just chutzpah. It’s deception. To propose all this knowing full well that we cannot even begin to afford it is irresponsible in the deepest degree. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the only difference between Republicans and Democrats now is that the Bush Republicans believe in Big Insolvent Government and the Kerry Democrats believe in Big Solvent Government.

Jacob Sullum of Reason too, notes that at the convention, “calls for cutting government and praise of the free market were conspicuous mainly by their absence.”

If it weren’t clear from their performance in Congress and in the White House, it would be clear from their platform that the Republicans have given up on reducing government even as an aspiration. The best they can do is assert that “our leaders must make sure that the growth of the federal government remains in check.”
Notice how, even in a document full of wishes that will never come true, the Republicans have resigned themselves to the inevitable growth of Leviathan. Notice, too, that they seem to think the government’s expansion is already “in check”; despite a 25-percent increase in federal spending since 2001, all they need to do is stay the course.

A while back I noted that the U.S. is by far the biggest arms producer in the world, with a military budget just about as big as that of the rest of the world combined and with the lion’s share of the international arms market.

But, go figure, we’re not making enough bullets fast enough to replace the ones we’re firing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Domestic production isn’t keeping up with demand, so the U.S. is going shopping in, among other places, Canada to make up the shortfall.

Novelist William Gibson (yes, I am a geek) lets me know that “About half of the roughly $5 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds disbursed by the US government in the first half of this year cannot be accounted for, according to an audit commissioned by the United Nations, which could not find records for numerous rebuilding projects and other payments.”

On the frequently daunting blog How to Save the World, Dave Pollard confesses how he sometimes nurtures plausible deniability and helplessness in order to avoid doing what he knows needs to be done:

That’s the ultimate bad news we don’t want to hear: That if we were willing to give up everything, risk everything, drop everything we’re doing, radically and immediately change our life style, agree not to do some things we really want to do (have another child, or buy that house we’ve been saving for) it would have an impact. We could, if we all acted fast, collectively, now, change the world, end poverty and suffering and global warming and crime and restore biodiversity and create a sustainable and harmonious world. But we don’t want to hear that news either. Like the Ten Years After lyrics say: “I’d love to change the world but I don’t know what to do, so I’ll leave it up to you.” So we find solace in the belief that it’s all bigger than us, that it would be impossible to coordinate such an effort, that most people don’t know and don’t care and so wouldn’t participate so it wouldn’t work, that the powers that be wouldn’t allow it, and mostly that it’s really not that bad, is it?
I’m sorry, dear reader. You didn’t want to hear that. Who the fuck am I sitting here in my easy chair doing nothing more than anyone else and telling people that they should be doing something drastic? What kind of hypocrite am I to be trying to deprive you of your plausible deniability that your inaction and your unawareness of how bad it really is, is complicit in all the horrors going on in this world, and the much worse horrors that our inaction will doom our children and our children’s children to? This idiot Chicken Little Pollard is running around telling us the sky is falling, but we’ve read the fable, and everything turns out just fine. Somebody shut that guy up.
I’m no leader. I learned that long ago. I haven’t the charisma, or the articulateness for that job. I’m a coward, with insufficient courage to go with my convictions. GI Gurdjieff said that civilized man lives in a dream, and needs to learn, through a very difficult process, how to awaken and live in the real world. You know that state when you first wake up in the morning, especially if it’s really cold outside, and you know you have to get up but you don’t want to, you kind of go into denial, pretending it must be Saturday, or that you’re still dreaming and when you really wake up everything will be warm and beautiful and peaceful? Well I think that’s where I am. I’m just awake enough to know I have to get up and do something, something important, but not yet awake enough to know what that is, or who I need to do it with, and I’m still kinda hoping someone else will call and say “Don’t worry, it’s done, go back to sleep.” But now I’m a little more awake than I was, enough to be aware of the fact that something must be done, and I can’t depend on others to do it for me. And, for the first time, my denials of that imperative, that need for action, have become implausible. And those of us who care enough to have to do something are calling each other up, in our half-awake state, making their denials implausible too.
But wait. It’s really not that bad, is it? Just let me lie here another five minutes, OK?

One of Pollard’s examples of denial and deniability concerns the work of Bjørn Lomborg, who is best known for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist (“Using statistical information from internationally recognized research institutes, Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental issues that feature prominently in headline news around the world, including pollution, biodiversity, fear of chemicals, and the greenhouse effect, and documents that the world has actually improved.”)

I haven’t read the book, and have only superficially followed the controversy surrounding it, but I did pay attention when Lomborg embarked on his next project, “The Copenhagen Consensus.”

The idea was that a group of eminent economists would look at priorities for assisting poor countries and try to rank them in terms of costs and benefits. The planned procedure was that an advocate would present a case for each of a number of possible global projects. Two “opponents” would then provide a critique. The panel of eminent economists would then distill the arguments and rank the possible projects.

Why economists? Lomborg believes that much of the public debate about what to do about pressing global issues suffers from being economically uninformed. Every choice made to address an issue in a particular way is one that has costs and trade-offs; attempting to solve one problem one way may necessarily mean not having the resources to attempt to solve another problem another way, for instance. He thinks we would all benefit from trying to rigorously quantify the costs and benefits of various approaches.

That, anyway, is the charitable point of view. Lomborg’s critics frequently complain that all of this is a smokescreen designed to hide his real purpose, which is to discredit environmentalist concerns like global climate change by using questionable data and prejudicial techniques.

Be that as it may, this group of eminent economists (including four Nobel Prize winners) did meet, and heard the arguments for 32 different proposals on how to attack some global problem — everything from adopting the Kyoto Protocol to reducing trade barriers to launching new initiatives for combating malaria. Their favorite?

Combating HIV/AIDS should be at the top of the world’s priority list… About 28 million cases could be prevented by 2010. The cost would be $27 billion, with benefits almost forty times as high.

I told you that so I could tell you this: The population of Iraq is roughly 25 million people. This week, president Bush asked Congress for another $80 billion in war funding.

Perhaps Lomborg and his crew can compare the costs and benefits of bringing Diemocracy to the long-suffering Iraqi people with those of some of the other proposals on their list.

(And yes, you caught me, I’m recycling this idea from my Picket Line entry of 3 June 2004. It’s still pretty fresh, isn’t it?)

Beware — rampant government spending miscellany ahead:

Remember about a year ago when Congress passed the Dubya Squad’s $400 billion Medicare bill and then the price tag changed abruptly to $540 billion? Well, a year later it rose again — to $724 billion, and as of this month, the damage stands at $1.2 trillion.
Some legislators have had the brilliant idea of addressing the alleged “crisis” in entitlement spending (as featured in the White House talking points about Social Security) by undoing this budget-busting blunderbuss. The President, who has never seen a spending bill he didn’t sign, threatened to veto any attempt to return this junker to the shop. Which leads Radley Balko at TheAgitator to quip, “at least we can now be sure he knows he has a veto.”
The Medicare boondoggle is only one example of the whiplash-inducing about-face on big-government spending from the Republican party. The New York Times did an analysis of the legislation supported by the “Gingrich Brigade” — that pack of Republicans who joined the House of Representatives in 1995. Back then, most of them sponsored legislation that would cut government spending; now all but two of the remaining Brigade members are pushing bills to increase government spending. The Times includes a telling graph of the legislators and their spending habits.
But isn’t Dubya trying to cut 150 federal government programs entirely? Sure, but Chris Edwards and Allan Reynolds note that “even if Congress passed all those cuts, 2006 spending would be reduced by less than 1%. Last year’s budget likewise proposed terminating 65 programs, but only five were actually ended.”
And this claim to be halving the deficit by 2008? First off, since Dubya inherited a budget surplus — what’s to brag about here? Second, it’s a bald-faced lie.
Meanwhile, stacked up against those modest cuts, even if they do materialize, is the off-budget supplemental war budget, $82 billion this year, which “exceeds the annual defense budget of every other country in the world, according to figures supplied by the Center for Defense Information. The organization says Russia, with the second-largest military budget, spends $65 billion a year.” (a lot of countries would be happy to have as much money to spend on defense as the U.S. lost track of in Iraq!)
When you get down to brass tax, it’s a big-government, big-spending budget. And that’s nothing new: “President Bush’s previous budgets increased spending by a dramatic 33 percent in four years, defense spending increased by 44.7 percent while nondefense spending increased by 41.9 percent. The administration has been arguing that much of the increase in non-defense spending stemmed from higher homeland-security spending. However, the fact is that over half of all new spending in the past two years is from areas unrelated to defense and homeland security.”
And a pricier government turns out to be a more invasive one, too: “President Bush’s second-term agenda would expand not only the size of the federal government but also its influence over the lives of millions of Americans by imposing new national restrictions on high schools, court cases and marriages.”
How has the Dubya Squad managed to combine tax-cutting with big spending? It hasn’t come from the promised miraculous expansion of the tax base due to a booming economy. It’s come from borrowing. But that’s run up the credit cards so high that even the tax-averse branch of conservatives are starting to wonder if they can tax the poor a bit more to avoid the pains of fiscal discipline or rescinding those nice tax cuts for the rich.

Not only has Dubya managed to get through one term plus of gluttonous Congressional Spending without managing to find his veto, but he’s also managed to avoid using his power of recission, which even Clinton (facing a split Congress) managed to slice away with over a hundred times at overfunded government programs. Congressman Jim Cooper explains.

War tax resister Susan van Haitsma’s response to the recent attention given to military recruitment is to look at The Recruiter in Each of Us:

I’d like to place all the blame on the Bush administration for maintaining this insatiable war machine that eats our young. But I think we all share responsibility. If we pay income taxes, recruiters are on our payroll.

Will the last libertarian who thinks the Democratic Party at least stands for peace and the defense of civil liberties please buy a beer for the last libertarian who thinks the Republican Party at least stands for smaller government?

President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn’t cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.
Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush’s first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton’s last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush’s first term.
The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent.
The GOP was once effective at controlling nondefense spending. The final nondefense budgets under Clinton were a combined $57 billion smaller than what he proposed from 1996 to 2001. Under Bush, Congress passed budgets that spent a total of $91 billion more than the president requested for domestic programs. Bush signed every one of those bills during his first term. Even if Congress passes Bush’s new budget exactly as proposed, not a single cabinet-level agency will be smaller than when Bush assumed office.
Republicans could reform the budget rules that stack the deck in favor of more spending. Unfortunately, senior House Republicans are fighting the changes. The GOP establishment in Washington today has become a defender of big government.

That’s the “Executive Summary” of a new report from the Cato Institute: The Grand Old Spending Party: How Republicans Became Big Spenders.

If you want to hear the ka-ching of Congress opening the money tray, swing by Washington Watch, where they tally up the numbers and tell you how much each bill is going to cost you. For instance, the average household is going to cough up $719.16 for H.R. 1268 The Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief, 2005.

It’s fun to watch conservatives practice the curious ideological yoga of trying to excuse or ignore this trough-snorkeling. Case in point: the feds reported a better-than-expected predicted income this quarter due to a larger-than-expected flood of last-minute income tax payments. The Washington Post announced:

Wall Street analysts reduced their deficit forecasts this week, from around $400 billion to around $370 billion. In nominal dollar terms, that would still be the third-highest deficit on record.… ¶ …Since President Bush entered office, the total federal debt — including debt to the public and debt owed the Social Security system — has risen from $5.7 trillion to $7.8 trillion.

How did the Drudge Report headline their link to this article? “IN THE BLACK: Tax Receipts Exceed Treasury Predictions; U.S. to Repay Debt in Current Quarter…”

Grab-bag time:

Wired reports that among the lessons learned from the study of the collapse of the World Trade Center is that you obey the advice of official authority at your peril:

After both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. Also, occupants of the towers had been trained to use the stairs, not the elevators, in case of evacuation.
Fortunately, this advice was mostly ignored. According to the engineers, use of elevators in the early phase of the evacuation, along with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2,500 lives.…
We know that US borders are porous, that major targets are largely undefended, and that the multicolor threat alert scheme known affectionately as “the rainbow of doom” is a national joke. Anybody who has been paying attention probably suspects that if we rely on orders from above to protect us, we’ll be in terrible shape. But in a networked era, we have increasing opportunities to help ourselves. This is the real source of homeland security: not authoritarian schemes of surveillance and punishment, but multichannel networks of advice, information, and mutual aid.
Among the authorities you are best-advised to ignore (void where prohibited) is the Transportation Security Administration, which has wasted no time in the years since its post-9/11 founding in becoming a stupid and wasteful bureaucracy. Among the items that showed up in a recent audit of the agency were a $526.95 domestic phone call, $1,180 for conference-room coffee, and $1,540 to rent 14 extension cords for three weeks.
The Boston Globe reports that (please quell your gasps of astonishment) “Congress, taking advantage of wartime support of national defense spending, is using the military’s budget to steer billions to pet projects that apparently have little to do with Iraq or the ongoing war on terrorism, according to congressional documents, government budget officials, and watchdog groups.”
And if that’s not enough for you, take a look at this London Review of Books article about the orgy of cash squandering in Iraq since the invasion.

Bits & Pieces from around the web:

Have you ever been tempted to want to expand the federal government with a new bureaucracy? Lord knows, many people have. But those few libertarian hold-outs may have finally met the ultimate temptation — the anti-agency agency:
The Government Reorganization and Program Performance Improvement Act of 2005 would create a standing sunset commission, which would review all federal agencies and programs every 10 years and recommend changes. If lawmakers did not vote to continue a program, its funding, not just its authorization, would automatically cease.
Of course, the commissions (it will take two, apparently) would be full of people appointed by the politicians, so I’d be a fool to expect much good to come out of them, but daydreams are free.
Rahul Mahajan at Empire Notes takes a critical look at the U.S. anti-war movement:
I begin with the observation that criticism of the war has been almost entirely as a fiasco, a failed and reckless venture, and not as a moral failure.…
In one breath, one mentions torture by U.S. troops, checkpoint killings, the savage destruction of Fallujah, and then in the next one talks about the great bravery and nobility of the troops that did it and of one’s complete support for them. Well, such a complete disjunction between the evil of the enterprise and the nobility of those who carry it out is just untenable. There is no need to paint the American soldiers as any more monstrous than the cogs in other monstrous machines have been. But neither are they any less so.
More important, the way they have conducted themselves and the way that Iraq has been treated since the regime change doesn’t just reveal something about the Bush administration. It doesn’t just reveal something about the military-industrial complex and corporate CEOs. It reveals something about American culture and about the deeper morality of this country and its people.…
The Iraq occupation is a mirror in which to look at this country, and so far nobody wants to take a serious look.
Zeynep Toufe of Under the Same Sun examines the implications of a recent claim by a U.S. General that “U.S. and Iraqi forces have killed or arrested more than 50,000 Iraqi insurgents in the past seven months.”
And here’s a little something for the “harm reduction” advocates. Alcohol prohibition finally ended in December 2003 in Athens, Tennessee — one of those freakish “dry town” hold-outs in our nation’s noble experiment. Well, when you keep an experiment going that long, you’re bound to pick up a few data points along the way. For instance:
According to court records, Athens police made one less misdemeanor driving under the influence arrest in 2004 than in 2003. The Sheriff’s Department and troopers made 37 fewer DUI arrests last year. That figure includes Athens police’s felony arrests.
Driving under the influence includes alcohol and drugs.
The city’s numbers are not staggering, but Athens police Capt. Marty Bruce said he sees an impact.
On the weekends since Athens went wet, police typically arrest two to three drivers for DUI, Bruce said.
“Before, it was eight to 10 people,” he said.

How did legalizing alcohol cut down on drunk driving? The Decatur Daily decided to ask a drunk driver for his opinion:
Kendall Dowell of Athens, who has four DUIs on his record, making him a felon, said going wet has kept people from driving to Huntsville and Decatur for alcohol.
“It is much easier for people to get the alcohol here, stay home and stay safe,” Dowell said.
More from MANAS:
In any society of the future worth talking about and working toward, independent moral decision will be the dominant cultural habit — the universal goal and the highest abstract good. So, when it comes to making a living, here and now, the primary task is to build a pattern of endeavor which permits that kind of decision — a pattern which, if and as it is successful, increases the opportunity for that kind of decision.
In this regard…
We recall the story [of] an eminent engineer whose professional abilities led him most naturally to municipal employment. This man, who was young in his career at the time of this episode, realized that municipal governments are sometimes corrupt. For him, right livelihood meant foresight in respect to the possibility that he might some day be asked to participate in dishonest practices, under pressure from the city fathers. Confronted by this abstract possibility, he laid plans for a small business of his own, so that he would be economically free, should he feel morally obliged to resign as city engineer. He was a man with a wife, two small children, and a mortgage, which made a steady income of substantial importance. It eventually happened that the small business was the means of preserving this man’s integrity without harm to his family.
People sometimes tell me that they admire the stand I’ve taken, and “wish” they could do such a thing themselves, but for some financial reason or other, they cannot. Sometimes these reasons are unforeseeable and urgent — more often, they’re ordinary but expensive lifestyle choices. It is a rare person who, like the engineer in the example above, has the foresight to consider moral autonomy an asset worth valuing as such and worth including in financial calculations.

Yet more about the proposals from the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform:

James Edward Maule reports that the proposals would allow everybody to deduct the cost of health insurance premiums.
Maule also says that the low-income savings credit (something akin to the Retirement Savings Tax Credit that I use) would be refundable — like the Earned Income Tax Credit is today.
You can see the panel’s own PowerPoint slides that they used when announcing their proposal by visiting their site.
The Tax Policy Center has established a web site dedicated to news and information about the panel and its proposals.

On Monday I wrote about a new report on the “tax gap” — the difference between the money people earn and what they report to the IRS. I was skeptical that the report was actually measuring what it was reported to be measuring. For more on that debate, from people who are more qualified than I on the subject, click here.

Roth & Company “Tax Updates”, in the course of discussing that recent tax gap report, includes a snippet from James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds on “the collective problem of how to get people to pay their taxes”:

[T]here are three things that matter. The first is that people have to trust, to some extent, their neighbors, and to believe they will generally do the right thing and live up to any reasonable obligations. The political science professor John T. Scholz has found that people who are more trusting are more likely to pay their taxes and more likely to say it’s wrong to cheat on them. Coupled with this, but different from it, is trust in the government, which is to say trust that the government will spend your tax dollars wisely and in the national interest. Not surprisingly, Scholz has found that people who trust the government are happier (or at least less unhappy) about paying taxes.
The third kind of trust is the trust that the state will find and punish the guilty, and avoid punishing the innocent… If people think that free riders — people not paying taxes but still enjoying all the benefits of living in the united states — will be caught, they’ll be happier (or at least less unhappy) about paying taxes. And they’ll also, not coincidentally, be less likely to cheat.

If Surowiecki is right, then those of us who oppose the funding of government can possibly invert this and try to attack those three pillars of support for taxpaying. The easiest of these pillars to attack may be “trust that the government will spend your tax dollars wisely and in the national interest.” And to address that point, here’s “Cicero” from To The People:

I’ve never liked saying that members of Congress spend money like drunken sailors, because sailors spend their own money whereas politicians spend other people’s money. But, no matter what you call it Congress is out of control. An October Webmemo by the Heritage Foundation shows conclusively that Bush and the Republican Congress have plundered our nation.…
Highlights:

Federal spending has grown twice as fast under President Bush as under President Clinton. In 2005, inflation-adjusted federal spending neared $22,000 per household, the highest level since World War Ⅱ.…

While members of Congress claim there is no “fat” left in the federal budget, Heritage claims otherwise:

The Defense Department wasted $100 million on unused flight tickets and never bothered to collect refunds even though the tickets were refundable.

The federal government spends $23 billion annually on special interest pork projects such as grants to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or funds to combat teenage “goth” culture in Blue Springs, Missouri.

Washington spends $60 billion annually on corporate welfare, versus $43 billion on homeland security.…

Over one recent 18-month period, Air Force and Navy personnel used government-funded credit cards to charge at least $102,400 for admission to entertainment events, $48,250 for gambling, $69,300 for cruises, and $73,950 for exotic dance clubs and prostitutes.

And for those Republican loyalists see the evidence that Congress and the Dubya Squad have been inflating the size and power and hunger of the federal government, who respond by saying “at least they’re cutting taxes”… I present for your consideration Dubya’s Treasury Secretary John Snow bragging that Washington has taken in the “highest level of federal receipts in history” since Dubya signed the Jobs and Growth Act.

The latest budget to come out of the White House included a list of what it calls “tax expenditures.” The government takes money from people in taxes, and it also spends money on this and that, but then there’s this third category in which the government subsidizes one thing or another not directly but through giving tax breaks. It’s not quite government spending, but it’s something worth keeping track of.

To calculate it, they had to come up with some sort of fictional flat-tax baseline in which all income is taxed, and then figure out how much the government “loses” or “spends” by not taxing, say, charitable contributions or employer contributions for employee health insurance plans.

For more on this, see the Tax Foundation’s Tax Policy Blog.

The federal government is currently spending 20.8 cents of every $1 the economy generates, up from 18.5 cents in 2001, White House budget documents show. That’s the most rapid growth during one administration since Franklin Roosevelt.

There’s a new edition out of the “Death and Taxes” budget graph that graphically displays where the money goes in the 2007 discretionary federal budget:

If you’re curious what happens when you don’t restrict things to “discretionary” spending, the author has created a supplementary graphic showing the budget as a whole.

So you’ve seen how “privatization” has been sweeping through government, so that now everything from prisons to warfare is “privatized”. Among the effects of this is increased corruption. If Senator Boondoggle has a bill on his desk authorizing the Department of Buncombe to spend $20 billion on something dumb, who’s gonna give him money to influence his vote? The Buncombe Federal Employees Union maybe, the people who hope to be on the receiving end of the Buncombe Department’s spending maybe.

But if you privatize the Department of Buncombe into the government contractor Buncombe Incorporated, it can lobby the government directly for more money by using the money it got from the government in the first place! Now we’re talking. That’s only one step removed from being able to fund your next campaign directly from the U.S. Treasury.

Says the New York Times:

The most successful contractors are not necessarily those doing the best work, but those who have mastered the special skill of selling to Uncle Sam. The top 20 service contractors have spent nearly $300 million since 2000 on lobbying and have donated $23 million to political campaigns. “We’ve created huge behemoths that are doing 90 or 95 percent of their business with the government,” said Peter W. Singer, who wrote a book on military outsourcing. “They’re not really companies, they’re quasi agencies.” Indeed, the biggest federal contractor, Lockheed Martin, which has spent $53 million on lobbying and $6 million on donations since 2000, gets more federal money each year than the Departments of Justice or Energy.

Some news-in-brief:

The Tax Foundation notes that the IRS is going to spend $200 million dollars of taxpayer money to let us all know that they’re going to be sending us “stimulus” checks and then to mail us the checks (not counting the value of the stimulus payments themselves). That kind of money “would have bought 74 Super Bowl commercials, which is more than the 63 that were shown at the last Super Bowl”
Some taxpayers challenged the way the IRS handled last year’s refund of the erroneously-collected federal excise tax on long-distance telephone service, and they sued. Their suits have been dismissed.
William Giunta suggests that you take a page from Dubya’s playbook and add a signing statement to your tax return. “Back it up by stopping payment of federal income taxes.”

Over the next year, the federal government will spend $1 of every $4 that is spent in the United States, reports Richard Wolf in USA Today.

Remember that when you hear “our free market economy” praised by the television pundits or condemned by the Shock Doctrine set.

That $1 in $4 — higher than usual thanks to the bailouts and stimulus-plan spending — will break a post-World-War-Ⅱ record set a few years into the Ronald “Government is the Problem” Reagan administration.

And this is only the most explicit and direct federal government participation in the economy. For instance, it doesn’t count the underground government, the many costly spending mandates the government slaps on individuals and private businesses, or the financial erosion of inflation. (Nor does it count spending by state and local governments.) Only part of this iceberg is above-water.

Any free market institutions remaining in the United States are like those earliest shrew-like mammals: tiny things, scurrying around trying not to get stepped on by some ginormous reptile.

But in a time of crisis, the dinosaurs proved unable to survive, and the mammals took center stage. Maybe an economic crisis is what it will take for the free market to emerge from the dinosaur’s shadow.

Matt Taibbi gets his dander up on our behalf over at Rolling Stone concerning the brazen robbery that is U.S. economic policy. To his credit, he ends his piece by bidding his readers to “enjoy tax season.”

For years now, a class action suit has been trudging through the court system filed on behalf of prisoners of the State of California asking for relief from conditions of imprisonment that fall below Constitutional standards.

They have good evidence for this, and so the highest court to yet hear their case agreed with them — saying, for instance, that California provides such an inadequate level of health care for those it imprisons that this is killing a prisoner every month and causing others to suffer needlessly from preventable and curable diseases.

The court ordered California to fix things, California agreed, but then dragged its heels instead. So four years (and you do the math on how many preventable deaths) later, over California’s strenuous objections, the court appointed a receiver with substantial power to oversee the prison health system and enforce the court’s orders. The receiver quickly reported that things were even worse than the court knew — “Almost every necessary element of a working medical care system either does not exist or functions in a state of abject disrepair” — and that it would take years to make things right.

California continued to drag its heels, and so finally the court ordered the state to reduce its prison population by 55,000 people within three years in order to reduce prison overcrowding to the extent that prisoner health issues might in theory be managable by the existing infrastructure. California continued to delay, appealing this ruling multiple times in multiple ways to the same court, losing each time, and finally vowing to ask the Supreme Court to rule that the Federal Court of Appeals doesn’t have the power to micromanage how a state corrects a constitutional violation (which might be more credible if the state were taking any independent steps on its own).

Why is the state so reluctant? Two reasons: 1) no politician wants to run against Willie Horton ads in the next election, and 2) the California prison guards union is very, very politically powerful, and has an interest in shaping state policy so as to increase the number of prisoners, thus the number of prisons and prison guards, thus the power of the union.

As you may be aware, the state of California is in dire financial straits, for a number of reasons. The court pointed out, hopefully, that reducing the prison population as demanded in the court order might also trim nearly a billion dollars from the state’s prison budget. But the state had a better idea: the latest California state budget cuts $811 million — 40% — from the prison health care system!

But I told you that story so I could tell you this one:

Cocktails are mixed with great sincerity at Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco. Take the Clermont Affair, a marriage of pear-infused Old Overholt whiskey, a liqueur called Amaro Nonino, barrel-aged bitters and a house-made tincture of cloves.
But for state liquor license regulators, the concoction itself is flawed. On a recent Friday night, they entered the speakeasy-themed Tenderloin tavern and warned bartenders they were breaking California law by altering alcohol — infusing it with the flavors of fruits, vegetables and spices.
Mixing elaborate drinks — say, muddling mint leaves in mojitos — and serving them immediately is OK. But, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents said, Bourbon and Branch was changing the character of the booze by allowing it to mature on the shelf — “rectification” that is illegal without a special license.