I’ve been deep into a war to protect and defend green grass for more years than I can recall, or want to recall. My use of the term “war” is cynical, of course. The term “war” in post WWII America seems to be applied to practically every endeavor where the path to success is illusive or unknown, and yet success is deemed inevitable. To relate it to my lawn seems reasonable, right? However, it occurred to me today while I was out on the front lawn fighting forces that seek to attack my grass that my efforts may relate more closely to war than I previously thought.
I discovered a few things over the years on how to grow and maintain a decent looking lawn, the full disclosure not worth repeating here. One thing I learned though is that a thick healthy lawn will protect itself fairly well without much input from me. It essentially crowds out its enemies. I also learned that by simply attacking botanical invaders as they pop up does a nice job of keeping them at bay. This worked particularly well with dandelions since I started a strategy of reaching down as I walked or mowed and pulling off their little yellow heads (that the mower didn’t get) before they could go to seed. Granted, I could have used a strong herbicide, but I’m just not into weapons of mass destruction (environmental sensitivities and so forth). Even without chemicals my lawn has been nearly free of that particular springtime weed for several years.
Now it is summer and the enemy isn’t weeds, but fellow members of the grass family. The first year crabgrass invaded my lawn it basically took it over in a few weeks. I chose to let the whole mess die under the summer sun, the crabgrass being the last to go. The second year was a repeat of the first, but this time I used a lawn fork to pull up the crabgrass. I was left with huge sprawling patches of naked dirt, looking like the battlefield it was. Then, over the past few years, I decided to employ Operation Dandelion to the insidious crabgrass infiltration. To my pleasure I discovered that it works…sort of.
You see, the dandelion method worked well on dandelions because it occurred in the spring, when rain is normally plentiful and the grass healthy. The crabgrass chooses its time to invade when the grass is stressed and weakened during the heat and dryness of summer. So I began to spend a few minutes each day walking about, reaching down and pulling new stalks of crabgrass from the lawn at an early stage in their development. The result was that the overall appearance of my lawn looked good…but I realized one thing. Unlike the dandelions, the crabgrass couldn’t be beaten, not entirely. It became so pervasive and entrenched in some outlying areas that it just wasn’t worth the effort to try and eliminate it completely…and so I haven’t.
It occurred to me that this country (you and me) has been conducting the War in Afghanistan in much the same way. The War was initiated, of course, as a reaction to the September 11th terrorist attack, with the legitimate goal of eradicating the precipitators, Al Qaida. Failing that, it became a war to build a government and support a social order in Afghanistan that would act as natural barrier to the ousted Taliban, and what they represent. Moreover, it is about winning - to be able to gaze upon something and call it “healthy”.
Our policy and/or strategy in Afghanistan is to walk about the country, at great expense and sacrifice, pluck out pockets of Taliban influence, and then wait for the indigenous population to grow and root deeply in freedom and democracy. What? The fact of the matter is that the Taliban will not go away, no matter how many are uprooted from this place or that, nor are there any seeds of democracy remotely close to germinating. The Taliban, radical Islamics, and endless sects of Jihadists remain covering the mountains that are part of both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and their seeds will continue to be carried west. They (the Taliban) were never the “enemy” in the first place. By our standards they were a socially repressive regime and international outcasts, but they weren’t our regime. The reality is that we are incapable of creating a fertile enough base by which the Afghan people will grow and flourish in our image, nor should they.
Our country is perfectly capable of obtaining the knowledge and taking proactive initiatives to attack assembled terrorist encampments as existed in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. We knew of the Al Qaida camps that were maintained in Afghanistan, but chose not to militarily enter a sovereign nation for reasons part political and part relating to international law. Given what occurred, that reluctance is not likely to happen again. There is no need, nor should we expect that a nation must be an ally of the United States in order to aggressively address sheltered terrorists. You might as well commit to clearing crabgrass from the entire neighborhood.
Obama, in an attempt to be consistent with his campaign positioning and with his debilitating pragmatism, has adopted the failed Bush strategy of nation building as the primary bulwark against terrorism (dare I say it – the War on Terrorism). The rest of the world that joined in the initial hunt for Al Qaida and Bin Laden is quickly accepting the failure of that strategy and pulling out. Obama’s participation to advance this “War” is the only Administration policy that has received unqualified support from the Republican Party. Why wouldn’t they? It’s the only Obama policy that has nothing but downside to it politically. Continued on the same course it will, in my opinion, be the only issue that will turn a decisive Obama victory in 2012 into a narrow defeat. Republicans may deride Michael Steele for his comments now, but come 2012 they will all be calling it Obama’s War.
We somehow feel the Afghan front yard should look like our front yard. We like nice tall fescue, or maybe cut short and dense…like on a putting green. Shouldn’t everybody? John Boehner would say “HELL YES”! Actually, I don’t think God or Nature singled out tall fescue as a blessed plant to contrast with an evil and sinfully hardy crabgrass. It is our growing and tragic legacy at the beginning of this century that we sacrifice our honor, our treasure, and a select group of lives in the misguided attempt to cultivate our landscape in foreign fields.
I also know that if I stop watering the lawn and stop yanking the crabgrass it will likely take over. Undoubtedly other things would begin to grow as well, crowding out some of the crabgrass, or simply living contentedly with it. I kind of like my grassy lawn, but I don’t mind the crabgrass that grows in pockets on the periphery; after all it’s still green. Sure I continue to fight back against the creeping crabgrass, but the lawn is mine, not my neighbor’s. If crabgrass grows well in distant sands…so it is. We would do better to maintain our own lawns and let the grass itself cast its seeds to the wind.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Just Another Shot in the Foot
I worked in the Tax field for 17 years, mostly managing a staff of tax accountants and their support. During that period I either completed, reviewed, researched, or had responsibility for the preparation of about 74,000 tax returns. These included returns for individuals, trusts (lots of those), estates, partnerships, private foundations, and occasionally, small corporations. Although I ended my participation in taxation almost 16 years ago some things stuck with me, things about the nature of taxation in the United States.
Like many in that field, once my expertise had been elevated to the level of being humble, I arrived at a conclusion contrary to popular opinion. I concluded that the massive body of law known as the Federal Tax Code (which includes Tax Regulations) is generally logical. There are actually a manageable number of themes that form the basis for the Federal Tax Code (the Code) from which most all tax law (fine tuned by the Courts) run consistent. State and local tax codes are less so, but most take their lead from los Federales. Once you have a grasp of the basics, when faced with a specific tax issue you can usually reach an accurate conclusion, even before you research case law (Court interpretations).
Opponents to the Code, moreover opponents to taxes generally, hold copies of the Code above their heads like dumbbells (no pun intended) shouting "look at this massive intrusion into our lives". However, for the vast majority of the American population the Code is relatively simplistic, even for businesses. I would venture a percentage of…say…95% are affected in a way that should be perfectly understandable by your average middle school student. Admittedly, inconsistencies are more prevalent on the State and local levels.
Our Federal tax system is mostly complicated (especially in volume) by use of the Code for social engineering and providing benefits to those who have the legislative clout to tweak it. Instead of just giving money to special interests, the Code is used as the vehicle for distribution - which provides a stealth element to the transfer. How easy would it be for a Congressman to hide behind a vote setting up a multi-billion dollar trust fund for oil companies? Credits and deductions are way easier. Arguably, many such laws in the code have positive intentions and outcomes. However, the inequitable or equitable use of the Code, which is really about appropriations, is not my theme here. It has to do with who is paying the bills and who doesn’t want to.
There is a huge faction in the US, mostly Conservative and frequently of limited income and wealth, who have been brainwashed and programmed to believe taxation, by definition, is evil. Although they may understand the collective requirements of funding a country, their emotional response to taxation is more closely aligned with the Roman tax collectors found in the New Testament. Taxing is the 2nd most prevalent target of the Tea Party set, right after Obama and right before Government, period. They have been successfully led (by whom?) to believe that the answer to the national fiscal quagmire is the elimination of Federal taxes combined with the elimination of Federal government spending, or as close as you can get to both. Even informed, educated Conservatives will respond in a similar fashion, which is both fascinating and frightening. What they fail to understand is, along with the vote, taxation is one of the few tools, weapons really, that the general population has to defend itself. These Conservatives are taking their beloved pistols in hand and emptying the barrel into their tootsies.
The evidence of wealth concentration in the United States is undeniable and has reached levels without precedent, in both extent of wealth and concentration. Personally I believe the primary facilitator of this lack of precedent is the demographics of population growth, which is also without precedent. Edward N. Wolff, a PhD at New York University and noted authority on the accumulation of wealth, calculates that 38% of all wealth in this country is owned by 1% of American households. If you take individual home ownership out of the definition of “wealth”, then the ownership of the top 1% increases to 50% of all asset value (property, stocks, bonds, cash, businesses, other real estate, commodities etc. etc.). Anecdotally, you just need to compare the net worth of Tiger Woods to Jack Nicklaus, or the level of Bernie Madoff’s larceny. The bottom 20% of households (about 60 million people) own nothing, their debts exceed their assets or they have no calculable assets at all (yard sales don’t count). My guess is that there are quite a few of those bottom 20% folks holding up signs at Tea Party conventions.
In order to eliminate our deficits, Wolff suggests substituting an annual tax on wealth (Property or Asset tax) instead of a tax on income (as income is an inaccurate representative of net worth). By starting at a level of $250,000 (eliminating 80% of the population from the tax entirely) and applying a progressive tax starting at 0.2% and rising to a maximum of 0.8% (for the numerically challenged: that’s eight-tenths of one percent, or 80 cents for every $100 of value) he believes we would be out of the red, all other things being equal. The very wealthy would bear the majority of the tax, but just how onerous would a tax be that diminished one’s multi-million or multi-billion dollar wealth by less than one percent annually? Could this happen in this country? Not likely.
Who would be hurt by such a system and who is helped? Answer that and you’re befuddled why such a method of taxation never even rises to the level of a discussion, while regressive taxes such as the “flat tax” or “value-added” tax are bounced around regularly. The streets outside the US capital are not filled with protesting multi-billionaires holding signs showing a Hitler mustached Obama and slogans about creeping socialism. They don’t have to. They have convinced their Conservative surrogates in the tens of millions that taxation, along with Government and Obama, is in direct opposition to their own well being. They know the general population has a gun in its hand, but the powers of wealth are chuckling mightily. With Pavlovian certainty, they know it has been trained to only shoot straight down.
Like many in that field, once my expertise had been elevated to the level of being humble, I arrived at a conclusion contrary to popular opinion. I concluded that the massive body of law known as the Federal Tax Code (which includes Tax Regulations) is generally logical. There are actually a manageable number of themes that form the basis for the Federal Tax Code (the Code) from which most all tax law (fine tuned by the Courts) run consistent. State and local tax codes are less so, but most take their lead from los Federales. Once you have a grasp of the basics, when faced with a specific tax issue you can usually reach an accurate conclusion, even before you research case law (Court interpretations).
Opponents to the Code, moreover opponents to taxes generally, hold copies of the Code above their heads like dumbbells (no pun intended) shouting "look at this massive intrusion into our lives". However, for the vast majority of the American population the Code is relatively simplistic, even for businesses. I would venture a percentage of…say…95% are affected in a way that should be perfectly understandable by your average middle school student. Admittedly, inconsistencies are more prevalent on the State and local levels.
Our Federal tax system is mostly complicated (especially in volume) by use of the Code for social engineering and providing benefits to those who have the legislative clout to tweak it. Instead of just giving money to special interests, the Code is used as the vehicle for distribution - which provides a stealth element to the transfer. How easy would it be for a Congressman to hide behind a vote setting up a multi-billion dollar trust fund for oil companies? Credits and deductions are way easier. Arguably, many such laws in the code have positive intentions and outcomes. However, the inequitable or equitable use of the Code, which is really about appropriations, is not my theme here. It has to do with who is paying the bills and who doesn’t want to.
There is a huge faction in the US, mostly Conservative and frequently of limited income and wealth, who have been brainwashed and programmed to believe taxation, by definition, is evil. Although they may understand the collective requirements of funding a country, their emotional response to taxation is more closely aligned with the Roman tax collectors found in the New Testament. Taxing is the 2nd most prevalent target of the Tea Party set, right after Obama and right before Government, period. They have been successfully led (by whom?) to believe that the answer to the national fiscal quagmire is the elimination of Federal taxes combined with the elimination of Federal government spending, or as close as you can get to both. Even informed, educated Conservatives will respond in a similar fashion, which is both fascinating and frightening. What they fail to understand is, along with the vote, taxation is one of the few tools, weapons really, that the general population has to defend itself. These Conservatives are taking their beloved pistols in hand and emptying the barrel into their tootsies.
The evidence of wealth concentration in the United States is undeniable and has reached levels without precedent, in both extent of wealth and concentration. Personally I believe the primary facilitator of this lack of precedent is the demographics of population growth, which is also without precedent. Edward N. Wolff, a PhD at New York University and noted authority on the accumulation of wealth, calculates that 38% of all wealth in this country is owned by 1% of American households. If you take individual home ownership out of the definition of “wealth”, then the ownership of the top 1% increases to 50% of all asset value (property, stocks, bonds, cash, businesses, other real estate, commodities etc. etc.). Anecdotally, you just need to compare the net worth of Tiger Woods to Jack Nicklaus, or the level of Bernie Madoff’s larceny. The bottom 20% of households (about 60 million people) own nothing, their debts exceed their assets or they have no calculable assets at all (yard sales don’t count). My guess is that there are quite a few of those bottom 20% folks holding up signs at Tea Party conventions.
In order to eliminate our deficits, Wolff suggests substituting an annual tax on wealth (Property or Asset tax) instead of a tax on income (as income is an inaccurate representative of net worth). By starting at a level of $250,000 (eliminating 80% of the population from the tax entirely) and applying a progressive tax starting at 0.2% and rising to a maximum of 0.8% (for the numerically challenged: that’s eight-tenths of one percent, or 80 cents for every $100 of value) he believes we would be out of the red, all other things being equal. The very wealthy would bear the majority of the tax, but just how onerous would a tax be that diminished one’s multi-million or multi-billion dollar wealth by less than one percent annually? Could this happen in this country? Not likely.
Who would be hurt by such a system and who is helped? Answer that and you’re befuddled why such a method of taxation never even rises to the level of a discussion, while regressive taxes such as the “flat tax” or “value-added” tax are bounced around regularly. The streets outside the US capital are not filled with protesting multi-billionaires holding signs showing a Hitler mustached Obama and slogans about creeping socialism. They don’t have to. They have convinced their Conservative surrogates in the tens of millions that taxation, along with Government and Obama, is in direct opposition to their own well being. They know the general population has a gun in its hand, but the powers of wealth are chuckling mightily. With Pavlovian certainty, they know it has been trained to only shoot straight down.
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