Category: Public Policy and Politics

Good causes, one and all

These are the organizations and projects to which I gave coin (generally tax-deductible), property, and/or effort in 2012. Please join me in supporting their work.

No victims here

Consider this an open response to Mitt Romney’s comments at a fundraiser:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

“…who believe that they are entitled… to food”? Willard Mitt Romney, shame on you!

Count me in as one of those “47-percenters” who do pay income taxes and who also support Barack Obama. I paid $12,804.06 in federal income taxes for tax year 2011 (somewhat more than that was withheld, and I got a refund), and I consider what I received from the federal government in return to be a damn good bargain. I also paid federal payroll and Medicare taxes (maybe not such a good bargain, yet) and state income, sales, personal property, and real estate taxes.

Romney has released his federal income tax return for 2010, and has released an estimate for his 2011 return. He remains coy about his returns and tax liability in earlier years. How much did you pay in 2009, Mitt? I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.

ᔥ The Atlantic

Science debate 2012

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama respond to the 14-point questionnaire from ScienceDebate.org and Scientific American. IMO, both of them play it fairly safe, with no big surprises on either side. About the most radical statement from Romney is this:

I am not a scientist myself, but my best assessment of the data is that the world is getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming, and that policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences.

Alas, he then proceeds to walk back most of this statement.

Trust me

David Firestone challenges Willard Mitt Romney’s “mathematically impossible” tax and spending proposals. There’s no there there:

… the presumptive Republican nominee claims his far deeper tax cuts would have a price tag of exactly zero dollars. He has no intention of submitting his tax plan to the [Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation] or anywhere else that might conduct a serious analysis, since he seems intent on running a campaign far more opaque than any candidate has in years.

* * *

… Mr. Romney has also vowed to repeal any Obama regulation that might burden the economy, without telling us which ones. Could he mean the power-plant rule that keeps mercury out of children’s lungs, perhaps? Or the one requiring better brakes on big trucks? Or the one expanding disability protections to people with AIDS or autism? Don’t expect an answer.

TSA blues

Patrick Smith and I are of one mind.

I’m traveling off-duty, just a regular old passenger. Approaching the body scanner, I “opt out,” as I always do. I’ll be taken aside for a thorough pat-down.

I don’t opt out because of worries about radiation. I do it because I find it appalling that passengers are effectively asked to pose naked in order to board an airplane.

Though I have some concerns about the radiation, too.

Good seats still available

These are the organizations and projects to which I gave coin, property, and/or effort in 2011. Please join me in supporting their work.

Stand and deliver

Michael Grabell, reporting for ProPublica, recaps the shameful railroading process that has placed hundreds of X-ray machines of doubtful safety in U.S. airports, in a misguided attempt to improve security. The depleted Food and Drug Administration chose not to regulate these nasty boxes.

The government used to have 500 people examining the safety of electronic products emitting radiation. It now has about 20 people. In fact, the FDA has not set a mandatory safety standard for an electronic product since 1985.

The Transportation Security Administration has no peer-reviewed research to back up its claims that the X-ray-based body scanners are safe, Grabell reports. On the contrary,

Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines. Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as “safe,” glossing over the accepted scientific view that even low doses of ionizing radiation — the kind beamed directly at the body by the X-ray scanners — increase the risk of cancer.

Mind you, the TSA and its contractors have rolled out two different body-scanning technologies, one using potentially harmful ionizing radiation, the other employing (perhaps relatively harmless) millimeter-length electromagnetic waves. But how is the flustered traveler to understand which machine the bored functionary is directing him to, and the concomitant health risks?

Who’s a fraud?

Stephen Marche mounts a spirited attack on a bit of Hollywood folderol, and digs out a more uncomfortable truth:

… antielitism is haunting every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” … Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.

Camus quoted

There are a couple versions of this eminently quotable passage from Albert Camus knocking around online, but I have found none of them that clearly cite the original essay and translator. So let’s rectify that situation, shall we?

This paragraph is from an essay that appeared in the symposium Réflexions sur la peine capitale, by Camus and Arthur Koestler, and published by Calmann-Lévy in 1957. Translated by Justin O’Brien, it appeared as “Reflections on the Guillotine,” and was collected into Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, published by Alfred A. Knopf, in 1961. The collection in English is posthumous, as Camus died on 4 January 1960. Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.

It’s the last three sentences of the paragraph that are most quoted (and most powerful), beginning with “what then is capital punishment…”

Let us leave aside the fact that the law of retaliation is inapplicable and that it would seem just as excessive to punish the incendiary by setting fire to his house as it would be insufficient to punish the thief by deducting from his bank account a sum equal to his theft. Let us admit that it is just and necessary to compensate for the murder of the victim by the death of the murderer. But beheading is not simply death. It is just as different, in essence, from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It is a murder, to be sure, and one that arithmetically pays for the murder committed. But it adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization, in short, which is in itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Hence there is no equivalence. Many laws consider a premeditated crime more serious than a crime of pure violence. But that then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. (p. 199)

(Thanks to The Atlantic for bringing this quotation to my attention.)

Hesitation, doubt, and ambiguity

Bill Keller proposes that the current occupants of the Capitol would benefit from a little poetry:

Poetry is no substitute for courage or competence, but properly applied, it is a challenge to self-certainty, which we currently have in excess. Poetry serves as a spur to creative thinking, a rebuke to dogma and habit, an antidote to the current fashion for pledge signing.

He quotes from William Carlos Williams (somehow I had remembered these lines as coming from Whitman): “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”

His colleague David Orr suggests some works that might serve as antidotes to the paralysis. I think Kay Ryan’s “All You Did” is especially pertinent.

Too bad Reagan didn’t listen in ’81

David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s first budget director, speaks out amidst the clangor of the fiscal and monetary policy debate in Washington. Ever a deficit hawk, these days he starts to sound reasonable:

In attacking the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 percent of taxpayers, the president is only incidentally addressing the deficit. The larger purpose is to assure the vast bulk of Americans left behind that they will be spared higher taxes — even though entitlements make a tax increase unavoidable. Mr. Obama is thus playing the class-war card more aggressively than any Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt….

On the other side, Representative [Paul D.] Ryan fails to recognize that we are not in an era of old-time enterprise capitalism in which the gospel of low tax rates and incentives to create wealth might have had relevance. A quasi-bankrupt nation saddled with rampant casino capitalism on Wall Street and a disemboweled, offshored economy on Main Street requires practical and equitable ways to pay its bills.

His op ed piece relies a bit too much on the the thesaurus (the spirit of William Safire is about). But the message that we will all have to give up something to get along is spot on.

It is obvious that the nation’s desperate fiscal condition requires higher taxes on the middle class, not just the richest 2 percent.

Bits are cheap

And clicking a Like button is too easy.

These are the organizations to which I gave coin, property, and/or effort in 2010. (Some of these were Christmas gifts to family members.)

Healthy Fairfax

Residents of Fairfax County (as well as the municipalities of Fairfax, Falls Church, Clifton, Herndon, and Vienna) are encouraged to complete a one-page anonymous survey prepared by the Partnership for a Healthier Fairfax. What should we do to improve the community’s health? The survey closes November 15, so please help out my friend Marie and fill out a questionnaire today.