Almost Classical

By the end of 2017, I'll care much less about all things political. I'm already finding the constant calls to "do something" exhausting. Sorry, but no... I'm not going to "do" anything anymore. I wrote... and wrote. I made art, including a satirical campaign film. Like many, I voted. I didn't get my way. Listening to Ohio and WV radio stations, I realize that the planned protests actually deepen the support some have for the winner. It makes them all the more committed to resisting "left-coast" radicals and the "elites" they already distrust and dislike. My job is to take care of our kiddos and take care of myself. That's about all I can manage, right now. And I'm pretty convinced that little will change (not nearly as much as some fear/believe) in a year or four years. Activism can wait until I'm up to it. Right now, the panic seems a bit much. Maybe it isn't, but it seems over the top to me. No, the...

Supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton seem to be stuck in reality distortion bubbles. This is slightly more pronounced on the Trump side, where outright misinformation is believed. But the Clinton supporters are quick to selectively cite misleading information. Misleading data are only slightly better (and sometimes worse) than wrong information when trying to understand and correct problems. Trump supporters: He lost the popular vote. There was no widespread fraud, no mobs of illegal immigrants storming the ballot boxes. He lost, and lost significantly on the raw national popular vote total. (But it is complicated. See notes to Clinton supporters.) He is the least popular president-elect in the history of polling data. There is no mandate. He plans to nominate a cabinet that troubles many traditional conservatives, libertarians, and progressives. That's not a way to build bridges when you lack a mandate. He has a serious problem with facts. You know, that "tr...

Stop blaming polls or calling them "wrong" because only the Huffington Post polling was seriously flawed. Every other model actually offered accurate *ranges* of potential outcomes. The polls were not wrong. Polls give probability not certainty. They were accurate. If I tell you Hillary Clinton has an 85% chance of winning... hello? She still has a 15% chance of losing. People didn't want to accept that. They assumed 85% = she can't lose. Sean Trende has attempted to explain this with the example of Pennsylvania. The commonwealth was a close election: so close that one percent in both directions did change the winner, but that does not make the polls incorrect. It wasn't the polls: It was the pundits What occurred wasn’t a failure of the polls. As with Brexit, it was a failure of punditry. Pundits saw Clinton with a 1.9 percent lead in Pennsylvania and assumed she would win. [ Note: Margin of error was 3% in most polling! ] The correct inter...

By November 7, 2016, a swollen spinal cord was making it nearly impossible for me to sit, walk, drive, or even rest. The next morning, my wife managed to get me to the urgent care center at our physician's office. His staff called in the doctor, who sent me off to the emergency room. Election day was spent with morphine, Percocet, an MRI, and a really bad reaction to the mix of painkillers and pain. My wife still stopped by the polling station on the way home from the ER that afternoon and we both voted. It was the most painful election ever. Worse than the election has been the days following. This is my own fault. I've been stuck in bed, on painkillers. Unable to type on my laptop, unable to sit and read for any sustained period of time, I have been consuming social media. Normally, I would have been outside during the daylight hours (four more decorative grasses to plant) and watching movies for my MFA classes. Instead, my semi-lucid moments were spent reading th...

Donald Trump in February 2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) You vowed to leave if Donald Trump won the White House. Leave. Please. Go. Be gone with you and all of your snobbery, your condescension, your identity politics. The rest of us have work to do! People from marginalized communities cannot pick up and leave the United States. And where would they go? Where would you go? France, where head coverings are banned? Germany, where anti-Semites are out in public again? Where is this mythical better place? A progressive friend posted that people struggling should move from places like Youngstown, Ohio, or rural West Virginia. Let me understand how that works. You have no money. You lost your job, might be on public assistance, have minimal technical skills.... Surely you can move to an expensive city with no problem. No. Most of us have to stick around. We have to gather up our resistance to a Pres. Trump and develop a more coherent strategy to salvange what moderates exist...

When you group people and make everything about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and a checklist of other "differences" you are also creating and reinforcing  the "Working-Class White Male Christian" grouping. That really is not helpful. Even a few of the New York Times ' writers are starting to understand this. Create groups at your own peril, progressives. You might find it doesn't help create a national identity or unity. The End of Identity Liberalism - The New York Times :   By MARK LILLA — NOV. 18, 2016 The whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting ...

Warren Buffett speaking to a group of students from the Kansas University School of Business (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) "A review of the 20 richest Americans, as listed by Forbes Magazine, found that 60 percent affiliate with the Democratic Party , including the top three individuals: Bill Gates , Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison . Among the richest families, the Democratic advantage rises even higher, to 75 percent." —Debt.org Just think about that and the paradox of the top of the top (the 0.1%) typically voting for and sometimes running for office as Democrats (FDR, JFK). The GOP holds the $75,000 to $187,000 range and starts to lose ground quickly at $200,000 -- the same line that marks most people with graduate or professional degrees. The Democrats have been, since about 1948, the party of the elites and the poor. The GOP has had a narrow window of voters in the white, high-school graduate and non-elite university bachelor's degree holder categories. ...

The election is over, thank goodness. I see social media posts suggesting we "relax" - but that's not what anyone should do, no matter who is in office. Both parties need vigilant voters to ensure there are checks and balances. Do things. Write. Blog. Create art. Criticize the powerful. Engage in dialogue with your neighbors and beyond. Get out of whatever bubbles you might be in, and we are all in bubbles, to find common ground with people of other ideologies. When I read some of the claims about Pres. Obama, I remind friends I side with socialist Cornel West and libertarians against extra-judicial use of drones, expansion of wire-tapping, the selling military "surplus" to police forces, the highest rate of deportations in U.S. history, and many other policies we have had during this time. How many bankers went to prison? I respect Pres. Obama more than I will ever respect a Trump or Pence. But I'm not going to waive my moral and ethical compass on issu...

Do we vote our consciouses? Do we vote pragmatically? Do we vote for our "cause" (party) even when the candidate falls short of our ideals? Why and how to vote are serious questions we should consider. Yet, I'm unconvinced there are "right" answers philosophically. Myself, I cannot vote for a person with whom I disagree or distrust significantly. That's a moral centering I cannot violate, even when it proves to be less than pragmatic. And in this presidential year, I disagree with and distrust all four major-minor candidates. That's depressing. David Frum offered "A Guide for Undecided Republicans⁠⁠: Choosing a president isn't easy in this election, but here are three ways a principled conservative might vote." http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/deciding-how-to-vote/504977/ It isn't a satisfying read, if only because it reminds us how lost the Republican Party and the Libertarian Party are. It reminds us tha...

speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Republican candidates, and the GOP in general, lost many of us in the "almost classical" liberal and libertarian subset of voters since 1992. The 1996, 2000, and 2004 elections drove us further away as the GOP enabled candidates and voters with no cohesive loyalty to classical liberalism . Some of us voted for George W. Bush in 2000, hoping for a return to the ideals of efficient (not non-existent) government and personal freedom. That hope quickly evaporated, as Bush was anything but fiscally responsible. Non-intervention went by the wayside, too. From the Patriot Act to No Child Left Behind , Bush was the president libertarian-leaning, local-government promoting voters feared. A Republican taking away rights, imposing federal mandates, and engaging in wars without end. Our first votes for "W" were our last votes for W… and yet he won again (and with the popular vote) in 2...

For many of us who have studied, deeply, the works of Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, Hayek, von Mises, Sowell, Mankiw, Garrison, McCloskey, and others with Austrian and Classical Liberal theoretical underpinnings, the death of the intellectual movement began when intellectually skilled yet stupid people like Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) were given credence by the Republican and Libertarian Parties. The Religious Right wasn't seeking religious liberty. It was, often, seeking a cover for hateful biases and a desire to legislate morality. Religious men and women led the Abolitionist movement and the Civil Rights movement, but those aren't the people of the modern religious GOP subset. We let racists, nationalists, sexists, and worse claim the banner of "personal liberty" and "states rights" when we should have been and must today reject these people. Horrible people have used libertarian and classically liberal ideals to defend their twisted opinions and hatre...

speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The economy is already rocky. This election won't bring a stable, growing economy, and it could bring disaster. In business, I'd rather know what taxes and regulations are ahead of me. If you can plan for something, there's stability. You might not like the programs and proposals of Hillary Clinton (I don't), but you can plan for what she would pursue as president. Donald Trump? His candidacy embodies the uncertainty businesses fear. It is like waiting for a natural disaster, but you don't know which type of disaster. Do we seek higher ground, to avoid a flood? Do we go into the basement to avoid a tornado? Trump is going to be something, but what will he be? Don't assume Trump cannot win. He can and he might. I'm not suggesting support for Hillary Clinton, either, but I am more concerned about Trump. The world today needs free trade. We need open borders. ...

This campaign season in the United States is already producing some meme myths on social media. One I keep seeing is the "90% tax rate" myth. Often, the responses prove people don't understand the marginal rate system of the U.S. income tax. Another meme that does reflect marginal rates claims there was a 70 percent effective tax rate. That's not quite reality, either, though. (It is, and it isn't, as I'll try to explain.) The most popular blog posts on Almost Classical remains The 90% Tax Rate Myth , in which I explain effective rates vs. top marginal rates and the relative stability of top rates excluding outliers of less than 10 tax filers. That’s necessary because some of the “top tax rates” would have applied to… ONE PERSON . As I wrote in that old post: As a result of deductions and exclusions, even the theoretical maximum Real Rate of taxation at 60% in 1944 overstates taxation dramatically. The reality? On earned income, the richest U.S. taxpayer...

The Inaugural Address reveals a lot about Pres. Obama. President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address - Washington Wire - WSJ :  Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, are constants in our character. I wish I could believe he meant those words, but too often it seems Pres. Obama has faith in central planning, that bureaucrats do know best what is "right" for the rest of us. He is insufficiently skeptical of government, its expertise, and its power. The next section is more along the lines of "You didn't build that…" (a statement I and many others have explored in context of his full campaign speech). The president reminds us that "collectively" we stand. A false argument, since nobody is arguing against all gov...

Party activists do not trust our election system. This is true on the left and the right. The left worries about voting machines, the right worries about voter fraud. Both have valid concerns — so why can't the extremes agree on solutions? Because in today's political climate "the other party" is pure evil, driven by party over country if you believe the loudest voices. And in this era of deep distrust and division among the party activists (the general public is nowhere near as divided), facts don't seem to matter. The Democratic party base claims photo identification requirements for voting are an attempt to limit minority access to the polls. This is nonsense, because these same voters use photo ID to buy alcohol, drive cars, attend school, rent movies, and much more. The voter ID laws won't change much of anything, and would probably only limit a handful of instances of fraudulent voting. Still, I do support voter ID laws as a way to increase faith i...

I hesitate to suggest a book I haven't yet read, but I read Sean Trende loyally. The book, available today, is  The Lost Majority . A link to the introduction can be found at:  The Lost Majority . The introduction states: This book makes three interrelated claims. First, that the 2010 midterm elections were a result of Barack Obama and the Democrats misreading both their mandate and how they had been brought to power, imagining a realignment in 2008 when, in fact, none had occurred. Second, that the emerging partisan majorities described by theorists from both parties are mirages. Third, that the entire concept of realignments/permanent alignments, which underlay much of the misbegotten analysis of the 2008 elections, is bankrupt and should be abandoned. I wholeheartedly agree with these statements. The "swings" mentioned in the media, by historians, and by some political scientists are illusions. The swings are of a few percentages, generally in the...

[NOTE Augusut 8, 2017:  The marginal and effective U.S. Tax rates mentioned in this 2011 post have been supported by research conducted by Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics), Emmanuel Saez (UC Berkeley and NBER), and Gabriel Zucman (UC Berkeley and NBER). These economic researchers are well-respected by progressives. Data are data, though we differ on interpretations. "Income" vs. "Wealth" presents much of the challenge, as wealth accumulates but is not taxed in the United States. Distributional National Accounts:  Methods and Estimates for the United States published July 6, 2017, includes the following table: As the table shows, the effective tax rate for the top 1 percent peaked at 45 percent of income in 1944-45. Unfortunately, the overall revenue intake of the United States kept growing and the burden has been falling most on the bottom 50 percent. Tax increases on the middle and lower classes reduce potential economic growth since...