The Taxes Message: Stupid

 

The Tax Structure

 

People often cannot understand why Americans vote against their self interest.   Some claim that Americans imagine that someday they will be in the upper classes and they don’t want to face the higher tax rates.  In fact it’s much simpler.

1. They cannot imagine what the rich people really make.
2. They don’t understand the difference between income from your labor and income from your investments.  Investment income, money making money is not familiar to people who labored for generations.
3. When the tax rates are discussed, the first thought is:  ” Wow, 35% of what you earn, that’s not fair”.  They imagine their meager income in the blank, since they cannot imagine the rich American’s income from #1 above.  Empathy is not for the rich person, the leap is made to their meager income.
4. They don’t understand arithmetic.  Most people have a hard time figuring out a tip in a restaurant, understanding taxation arithmetic is horrifying.
5. They don’t get the nuance that the higher rates are applied to an amount above X, not the whole income, with a large dose of exemptions and deductions.
6. They don’t get it that rich people spend a good part of their income and time finding ways to avoid taxation.
7. People’s eyes glaze over when the discussion of taxes takes place.  They just know they don’t like it.
8. Basic lack of a civics education that provides understanding of how the government works and what is paid with the taxes.

So, all the discussions about taxes should be made under this basic understanding of the audience.  A visceral aversion to something they don’t understand and don’t care to understand because it is so complicated.  All that most people think:  ” I don’t like to pay taxes”.  The rest is confusion and avoidance.  Of course this confusion and avoidance is the political game of both parties.

Romney and the Republicans, know how to push the key words that first bring empathy and then confusion.  In this three card monty, the voter just takes away one message:  ” more taxes no good for anyone, this is the only way I will be safe”.

Unless the Democrats understand these short comings in the voters they will miss the Romney opportunity.    Because of the shortcomings in the list above, voters will miss the obvious:  ” Romney is the Marie Antoinette moment of the GOP”.  Of course, they also enjoy the confusion and ignorance of the voter.   In fact, he is worse than Marie Antoinette, at least she had some redeeming qualities and was thrown into a situation to be the stooge for the aristocracy.  Romney is a product of America’s aristocracy and dedicated to preserving it at all costs.

I am waiting to see who will start speaking in plain language, with clarity and with the desire for the voters to understand and not to perpetuate the confusion.  First they create a complex system, then they try to sell you nuance in the system.  The game is rigged against the majority of taxpayers and voters.  Voters need basic education about their system before they can make decisions.

We are in a fog and we are led by people who manage the fog machine.

Romney: Wrong Man For the Job

This Sunday on ABC’s  This Week, George Will said the following about Romney:

WILL: I think they do both. But they probably, on balance, immunize him more. It’s been 70 years, George, since Joseph Schumpeter, a famous Austrian economist then at Harvard, put into our vocabulary the phrase “creative destruction.” American people are clear that capitalism destroys jobs on occasion.

Actually Mr. Will, Karl Marx first used the term to describe the cannibalistic nature of capitalism.  Then, your Austrian friends white washed the term to describe a rebirth.  I am not an economist, but unlike the Federal Reserve governors, I saw the economic collapse coming.   Where George WIll and Romney see creative destruction making room for new companies, I see that society is left with the people and the things destroyed.  Same with the American people, they know that jobs will be lost, but they need and want some kind of help from the nation when that destruction takes place.  In fact, sometimes, if not often times, the Romney style “creative destruction” did not take place because of some up coming new idea, it happened because there was money to be made in simple “destruction”.  The creative element was not part of the Romney equation.

Romney, the “creative destructor”  moved to find another body to destroy.  The destruction, the unemployed and the empty factories then became a social responsibility.   Picking off the carcasses of dying companies, or even viable companies, simply to nourish  portfolios from the transaction of the kill has negative outcomes that are never considered in the cost of the Romney style transaction.  The negative social outcomes are then left  to the individuals and the communities that were effected to manage.  Will and Romney tell us that wait, the public funds, like a Canadian Teachers Union Retirement fund benefited.  Well if they did, that was just as bad and they should have had policies to not invest in such transactions.  There are socially responsible policies that do not rely on such outcomes.

Romney claims that this expertise, the “creative destruction” niche, gives him the expertise to manage the economy.  Well, if you consider that the economy has been savaged and is on the brink of more catastrophe, why, would we hand it off to an expert in “creative destruction”?   There are other capitalists, such as venture capitalists, who invested and financed new companies and new ideas.  Romney was not a “work out genius”, nor did he have a keen eye for new ideas that would take economic sectors out of the “creative destruction” phase.    Now he claims that he has the skills, the knowledge and the credibility to fix the “creative destruction” remnants.

Romney, was good at what he did.  In fact at Bain he was very good at “creative destruction”.  As far as I can tell, these are not the skills we need to serve the nation and the people.  Capitalism may be fueled on “creative destruction”, but nations are not.  Nations are populated and serve all the people, not just the segments that are growing and or have potential.  Nations have to serve the people who were creatively destroyed because frankly, the markets never look back.   Romney has never served or cared for the communities or the people he “creatively destroyed”.   Wrong man for the wrong job.

Is America going to be his last project in his “creative destructor” career?  Creative destruction has negative outcomes and consequences.  Romney never paid attention only to the outcomes that served him and his company.  Let me put it kindly, or in the language he would understand:   ” Mr.  Romney, you are the wrong fit for the position of President of the United States”.

 

The picture is from my garden.  The leaves fall, I gather them .  They go into the tomato cages.  By summer I will have some mulch for the new plants.  Creative destruction at work in the garden and in nature.  Not the same idea in Bain style capitalism.  

When People Are Not People

Governor Romney, while on the campaign trail, told us that Corporations are people.  Then just the other day, on the campaign trail, he told us : Corporations are people too.   Then, in January, he tells us he ” Likes to fire people” 

The newly minted socialists, Perry and Gingrich, grab the moment to paint him as the meanest man in the world.   On the left, many of us jumped to accuse Gingrich and Perry of taking the quote out of context.  That is wrong, the word is perfectly in Romney context.  People are people.  Corporations are people.  Therefore, Romney loves to fire both.  Easy.  Now Perry and Gingrich, just like to fire teachers and public employees.  You see, in their dictionary, teachers and public employees are not people.

You see, in the past century and millennium, people used to be people.  We even had songs about people.  In case you don’t remember what people used to be.