OK, so here's my rebuttal to the silliness masquerading as the "ultimate takedown" of Obama's recent campaign speech and by extension Elizabeth Warren and all modern progressive thinking, posted by Zombie on the PJ Media website this past week (1).
Zombie identifies what are (in his opinion) three essential assumptions of Obama's speech which, if disproven, cause Obama's "whole argument to collapse".
1. The public programs Obama mentions (education, infrastructure, public safety, and the internet) constitute a significant portion of the federal budget.
What? Obama points out that certain services provided by the government are essential to business owners for their success, but his argument fails if they are not a significant portion of the federal budget?
First, let's just dismiss this entirely by noting that Obama wasn't trying to explain the entire Federal budget and provide all the justifications for every line item. He was just talking about infrastructure, virtual and tangible, as it supports business.
What Zombie is trying to make Obama say (even more strangely) is that every other program not mentioned by
Obama is consequently "a complete waste, or are at best optional". Like, say, cancer research, and the National Weather Service, and combatting forest fires, and mapping and marking all of the navigable waterways of the US with buoys. And we don't need that silly State Department or a Treasury Department to print money. So thus we should "slash the federal budget by 75%."
He has clearly and irrefutably (to himself) proven that because Obama didn't spend 15 hours listing every single important government program in a campaign speech, therefore none of them are necessary and we can just throw them out. An instant victory and now the "stool has toppled over".
2. The wealthy aren't paying their fair share of taxes.
To misquote Bill Clinton, "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'fair' is." Zombie correctly points out that the top 1% of taxpayers pay 36% of all taxes. But what does that say about fairness? Absolutely nothing: fairness is measured by comparing share of taxes against share of income. What he compares is the number of high income earners (top 1%) against total taxes paid in dollars. It's a commonly quoted but completely spurious argument. Why? Suppose I told you that the top 1% earned 99% of all income, but only paid 36% of taxes. Same 1%, same 36% – but a completely different picture.
That is of course not the case; it's just an example of why Zombie's argument compares apples to oranges. So let's do his work for him and compare apples to apples.
IRS tax summaries (2) reveal that the average income tax rate in the US is 11.06%. If we had an ungraduated income tax system, everyone would pay that same rate (without deductions, exclusions, etc.). But we have a graduated income tax system, intended to lessen the burden on the poor by requiring wealthy income earners to pay a higher rate. Is this fair? One argument in favor is that fewer taxes on the poor give them a greater chance of saving their way into the middle class, where they might buy homes, educate their children to become better citizens/workers, and eventually earn more – and pay more taxes. Of course, this means that the rich pay more than the average rate of taxes today, and some of those taxes are used for assistance to the poor, unemployed, disabled, etc. That is without argument a re-distribution of wealth. But we accept this to prevent a permanent Calcutta-like destitute class from emerging, which, given our one-man, one-vote system, could turn into a serious source of political instability. Anyone remember the draft riots (3)?
If you compare the ratio of taxes paid versus income earned (IOW, an average tax rate), the top 1% pay a rate of 24%, which is 2.17x the average rate. So we penalize the sad old rich by making them pay twice what they ought. The 10-25% tranche earns greater than $66,000 but pays an average tax rate of 8.23% – just ¾ of the average overall rate. And it goes down from there. The cross-over point, it turns out, is the 5-10% tranche, which pays an 11.8% rate, just a fraction above the average:
We could argue all day long about what's fair (higher taxes for the top 1%? The top 10%? Everyone?) But that's not what Zombie argues. He argues that if we just cut the Federal budget by 75%, golly, the top 1% would pay for everything, and all the rest of us 99% could pay nothing at all. IOW, let's make the system even more tilted than he claims Obama is saying it is. Now that's fair.
3. Education, public safety and roads are covered by local taxes, not federal taxes.
Zombie points out that many of the infrastructure services mentioned by Obama are funded at the local or state level, not the Federal level. From this he concludes that "Obama has just unintentionally proved the conservatives’ case for limited government".
Really? The Interstate highway system is a local project? The internet? The military? Hydroelectric dams?
All right, you can argue that much of the Federal budget could be better spent at the local level. But – surprise – it is. The US government grants or pays $552 billion (yes, that's ½ a trillion dollars) annually (c. 2009) (4) to state and local governments to spend locally, much of it for agricultural, developmental, educational, and medical purposes. $250 billion of that is for medical assistance programs (Medicare and Medicaid).
All right again, we don't have to spend that money at either the Federal or the local level; we can just cut the programs and thus cut taxes, period. Now my progressive question to Mr. Zombie is: what to do with all those former Medicare and Medicaid recipients who show up at community hospitals with treatable communicable diseases such as, say, tuberculosis or leprosy or what all? Someone will have to pay the taxes to treat those patients, uncovered as they will be by any sort of insurance or (if Mr. Zombie prevails) any sort of Federal medical assistance program, and that's the local taxpayer. (Or maybe not. Unfortunately, Gov. Rick Scott chose to close the only TB hospital in Florida just as the worst outbreak in 20 years occurred, so maybe they won't show up at all: they'll just die in the streets. (5))
Maybe, just maybe, Zombie will agree that perhaps we might have to raise local and state taxes a teeny little bit to make up for that $550 billion he just casually disposed of from the Federal government. Yay, conservatives win: limited Federal government. Oops, conservatives lose: increased local and state government spending.
No doubt Zombie would respond that far more would be saved in Federal taxes than raised in local and state taxes to compensate. That needs to be proved, not claimed. All those Federal government employees live and work in small towns and cities across the country, spend their paychecks in local businesses, and pay local taxes. Once you suddenly unemploy them all, it's the remaining local population that picks up the bill in lost revenues, taxes, and increased social care programs. I'd bet the costs of increased local spending comes largely close to what the Federal government was spending to start with.
--
Quoth Mr. Zombie: "The stool is now in pieces on the floor. But I just can’t stop kicking."
Zombie demolishes Obama's mistaken assertion that "Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet". He's right. The Internet was originally (or perhaps ultimately) funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to explore ways to maintain command and control of America's defense computer communications systems in the event of nuclear attack. Now, having made that point, you might suppose the Mr. Zombie would claim Obama's misstatement is yet another proof that we didn't need to pay for such a wasteful liberal social program with big-government taxpayer funds. But he doesn't, because he can't. We needed the internet (and, yes, the interstate highway system, and other Federally funded boondoggles, everywhere like such as) for military reasons – which must be paid for at the Federal level, with taxes. How does this advance his argument for limited government? It doesn't.
In fact, the interstate highway system and the internet are two extraordinarily good examples of Federal spending that provided returns to the economy and to the wealth of individuals vastly in excess of the investment by the taxpayer. I haven't even mentioned the development of microelectronics for missile guidance and the iPad. Or that folly of Seward's, the acquisition of Alaska, and the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. (Neither of which were mentioned by Obama.) So a reasonable person would be excused for thinking that perhaps taxpayer-funded R&D programs are, in fact, just a wonderful idea and let's do lots more.
--
Finally, Zombie realizes that someone somewhere is going to knock his arguments down with rebuttals, and he even anticipates some of the very ones I have raised. He tries to sidestep them either by A) asking how government programs benefit business (most don't, unless you think that healthy, educated workers with stable home lives are good for business) or B) by playing a complete shell game with Obama's speech, to wit:
"But should they (businesses) pay taxes to fund every progressive social fantasy? That’s open for debate, and that’s not the point Obama and Warren were making. Overtly, at least…We should thank President Obama for finally revealing the central justification for his economic policy. Now that we see what’s at the heart of his fiscal philosophy, we can demonstrate that he has only ended up proving the opposite of what he intended."
I have no idea what's he saying here. If paying for every progressive social fantasy is not the point that Obama and Warren were making, how does he conclude that they have revealed a central justification that is the opposite of what they intended? Mr. Zombie might wish that Obama had said that all taxes are justified because a little of them benefit business. But he didn't. Mr. Zombie might selfishly dismiss social programs as fantasies, but they have saved and improved the lives of countless people, some of whom we can reasonably assume went on to earn livings to pay for their children's upkeep and education so that the state doesn't have to.
All in all, Zombie's arguments reinforce the two basic rules of the right-wingnut view of government:
- Government can do nothing right, ever.
- Except the military, which can do nothing wrong, ever.
We used to value the notion of enlightened self-interest in this country, whereby sacrificing a little personally would in the end benefit you by benefitting the whole. But we seem to have discarded it. Perhaps Zombie is right. Perhaps we should junk all the social programs and entitlements, since they don't benefit business and the major taxpayers, and are often plagued with waste and corruption. Perhaps we should let the privately owned free market system run everything: we all know how there is never any corruption or waste in the private sector, and it always finds the best way to benefit the nation as a whole, what with outsourcing and holding profits offshore to avoid taxes and lobbying and so on. Perhaps a society with all the money in the hands of those who control capital, and none of it in the hands of anyone else, is a better one, since then the wealthy can afford to build barricaded communities and hire bodyguards to protect them from the impoverished masses like they do in Mexico. Perhaps wasteful business-impeding regulatory agencies should be abolished, so that our companies can compete effectively with, say, those in China, and be free to make fake drugs and poisoned dog food and lead toys for children. Imagine the potential for our future! I can't wait.
Zombie, indeed.
_____
(1) "The Ultimate Takedown of Obama’s ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Speech" (http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2012/07/18/the-ultimate-takedown-of-obamas-you-didnt-build-that-speech/)
(2) "Summary of Latest Federal Individual Income Tax Data" (http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-individual-income-tax-data-0)
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots
(4) "Federal Aid to States for Fiscal Year 2009" (http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/fas-09.pdf)
(5) "Florida Ignored The Worst Tuberculosis Outbreak In 20 Years" (http://www.businessinsider.com/florida-tuberculosis-outbreak-2012-7)