Dithering on Hard Choices

I've been putting off this post for a long time. I've never claimed to be other than a devout Roman Catholic and adamantly pro-life, but I haven't had a lot to say in this blog, or in any other forum for that matter, about abortion. It is a divisive, emotional, and controversial issue. It takes a certain amount of courage to speak out on it because doing so is sure to result in some heated disagreement if not outright vitriol.

I prefer to avoid confrontation as a rule, so when mommy bloggers that I follow post, for example, that they are sick to death of fat, middle-aged, white, Republican men trying to misappropriate moral choices that ought to be the sole purview of women, I hold my tongue. I do this because 1) I don't want to offend the sensibilities of otherwise smart and funny women on the basis of my disagreement with them on one issue, and 2) being a fat, middle-aged, white, Republican man I am already seen to lack any credible moral standing on, not just this, but many issues facing women.

Now that I'm changing my stripes, so to speak, by championing the Democrats' more 'touchy feely' approach to economic policy I find I have to confront the Democrats' decidedly non 'touchy feely' stand on abortion. I may not be a Republican any more, but neither am I a Democrat. Without the relative harmonic safety of one camp or the other, I find I need to 'nut up' and explain myself more fully. Likely this won't be any easier to read than it was to write.

Life in the Balance

I like to say that I used to be a Voldemort Republican. That's not strictly true. I've been a one-issue Republican voter for as long as I care to remember. That one issue is life. The other issues that constitute true ideological Republicanism are not so dear to me. I go back and forth on some of them. I'm just plain opposed to others. Lately I've abandoned supply side economic theory because I have come to believe that it has been a spectacular failure, even though it remains bedrock Republican economic policy. I used to buy it, but I don't any longer. This is why I call myself a former Voldemort Republican.

I've not changed my mind about abortion though. I still vote a pro-life ticket. It's not that I don't care about other issues. I do, but for me the issue of life takes precedence. For me it's been the most important issue when it comes to my vote. If you are wrong on the issue of life, nothing else really matters. It is the last purely moral issue on the table. Everything else is political or economic or both, but the issue of life is central to our humanity.

If you want to vote pro-life, you pretty much have to vote Republican. I don't really understand why this is. It doesn't make sense to me that the Republicans are pro on life and Democrats are pro on choice. I would think it would be the opposite, especially when you consider that, on the other major life issue, capital punishment, the Republicans want to kill you and the Democrats want to rehabilitate you and turn you loose. It's as if, at least as far as the political parties are concerned, it was all a matter of timing. The Republicans want to kill you after you're born, and the Democrats want to kill you before. I don't get it.

You would think that the GOP, the party of individual rights and curtailing government involvement in matters of morality, would be pro-choice. When I hear the pro-choice argument that government shouldn't be telling women what to do with their bodies, and that the decision to have or not have a child is a matter to be decided by the family and not the state, I think that sounds just Republican as hell. And yet the Republicans are happy to interpose government in your moral choices when there is a baby involved, but only, it would seem, before the baby is able to make demands of its own on various entitlement programs.

After you're born, it's an entirely different matter for Republicans. After you're born, Republicans are not so much pro-life as they are pro-keeping-what's-theirs. Once you're weaned from mother's milk and start suckling at the public teat, your life is suddenly not worth so much. You fail the Republican cost benefit analysis. This is why Republicans love capital punishment so much. It puts an end to your state paid support. They want to cut the cost and get you in the ground before you bankrupt the system.

They feel the same way about a lot of entitlements that are meant to keep body and soul together. They don't want to pay for your social welfare or your health care or your food stamps. They don't want to pay unemployment benefits. They just want you to either get a job and pay your own way or go away quietly and die. And no, they're not going to spend any money to create jobs either. That's your lookout. If you want to work, work. It's just that simple. There's not a lot of logic or consistency at work in Republican principles, and for the GOP, what claims to be pro-life, isn't. Not really. I don't know what it is, but it's certainly not consistently about life.

On the other hand, you would think that Democrats, who have traditionally been associated with grand social engineering to lift the oppressed masses out of poverty and affliction and servitude would be in favor of protecting the most disenfranchised of humanity—the unborn. Democrats have always been about legislating the right thing to do, and so they are historically and philosophically associated with The New Deal, The War on Poverty, Affirmative Action, Medicare, Civil Rights, Head Start, The National Endowment for the Arts, Consumer Protection, The Clean Air Act, and others. This being the case, one has to wonder why they keep pushing to expand a woman's right to impose her choice over the rights of her own unborn child to life, liberty and the other guarantees of our Constitution.

Democrats love killing babies—so much so that they don't want people thinking about it much before they get abortions. They are against counseling, they are against educating young women about alternatives, they are against involving families in the decision, and they are against waiting.

They are not against waiting when you've already waited too long though. If you've been dithering about getting an abortion into the third trimester, when fetuses are viable and abortions are not for the squeamish, then they think you should be able to have something called a 'partial birth abortion', a procedure so draconian it can scarcely be discussed in polite company.

In a partial birth abortion, labor is induced, and the baby is allowed to start its trip toward the light at the end of the tunnel. It's not allowed to complete its journey though. Once the tike crowns, it's little skull is pierced with a surgical spike, and its brains are vacuumed into a jar. Then the rest of its now lifeless body is allowed to pass into the world where Democrats will applaud its mother's pluck, and, if she's poor enough, pay for the procedure.

Democrats are actually okay with this. It's the mother's body, they say, and so it's the mother's decision. I would argue that, at the very least, it ceased to be about the mother's body when the baby crowned. In fact I would argue that it ceased to be about the mother's body long before that. I know that, officially at least, the jury's still out on this, but I believe it stops being about the mother's body at the moment of conception. I don't think I'm alone in this. Even Democrats agree...sort of.

Here's where the Democrats are as inconsistent and illogical as Republicans. It's about the woman's body when they're talking about abortion, but if an expectant mother smokes crack, or snorts cocaine, or drinks, or smokes, or abuses prescription medications, then it becomes all about the baby. Democrats don't want you doing anything that might injure your unborn child, unless of course you want to have it killed. Then suddenly it's all about women's rights, and the baby be damned. Oh...and they want the Republicans to agree to pay for it too.

It seems to me that the political parties have got it backwards. If they would just switch positions on abortion, I would have a much easier time embracing the social justice championed by the Democrats over the inequities fostered by the Republicans' dogged insistence on supply side and trickle down economic policies. As it is I have to continue to vote a pro-life Republican ticket because babies can't vote for themselves. I have to continue doing this even though I am certain, way down deep in my analytical accountant's soul, that the Republicans are wrong on just about every other important social and economic issue. I'd certainly feel a lot better about my choices if the choice was clear and consistent on choice.

And here's a final irony—as if choosing weren't difficult enough already. The current state of the economy is putting more and more pressure on women to have abortions. Sure, we're supposed to be in a recovery, but nobody is putting Americans back to work. There are 14 million jobless Americans on the unemployment rolls. There are probably another 11 to 12 million people who are off the official rolls or seriously underemployed. The Republicans don't want the Democrats to solve this problem. They want everyone to wait until 2013, when they hope we will have a Republican administration that can save us all from the Democrats' profligate spending.

Meanwhile, for the millions of jobless and uninsured, having a baby is a bankruptcy event. From a purely fiscal perspective - the favorite perspective of your quintessential pro-life Republican - abortion begins to look like a sensible choice. This may be an unintended result, but that doesn't make it any less real. Any policy that prolongs joblessness fosters abortion. Any policy that increases poverty increases the abortion rate. Any policy that denies basic subsistence and health service options to those who need them most denies life to the unborn. An increase in abortions may be against Republican principles, but it is at least consistent with Republican economic policy. The last thirty years of economic history proves this.

Republicans will argue that the key to economic recovery rests in unfettering the private sector from the burdens of regulation and taxation. Our problem, they say, is big government and runaway spending eating away at the incentives of business to succeed. If we would just reduce taxes on the wealthy and on corporations and loosen the regulatory noose we would see marked and immediate gains in productivity, employment, and prosperity, and these gains would benefit everybody. You've no doubt heard this mantra before. It is currently being touted by virtually every Republican candidate for the presidency. They only vary among themselves in how much they want to give to the wealthy in order to fuel this dramatic turn of fortune. I have to wonder how they can possible hold on to this supply side pipe dream that has been a virtual non-starter since the Reagan years.

If any of this stuff was going to work, it would have worked by now. It hasn't. We haven't had thirty years of unparalleled prosperity. We have had thirty years of consistently lowering taxes on the richest Americans. We have had thirty years of significant erosion of regulations that were originally put in place to protect us from boom, bust, and bailout cycles. We have had, in other words, pretty much full realization of the Republican supply side initiative without any realization of its promises.

Instead of prosperity we got ever more volatile bubbles, followed by ever steeper declines and ever more expensive public fixes. Instead of investment in innovation and jobs growth we got richer rich and poorer poor. The rich didn't invest in America as promised. They invested instead in a status quo designed to keep them at the top of the food chain. They did not risk their capital seeking gain. They used their gains to eliminate their risk. Whenever they made mistakes, which was often, they relied on poor and middle-class taxpayers to backstop their plays. In the words of Nobel laureate in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, we got the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses.

Today the rich are richer than they've ever been. Corporations are booking record profits and are sitting on unprecedented amounts of cash. Even so they are not investing in new technologies and they are not hiring Americans. They are not doing any of the things that supply side theory tells us they are supposed to be doing with their money. And yet, almost unbelievably, the Republican solution is to lower taxes even more on the wealthy and on corporations, and to further emasculate the regulations that are meant to protect the vanishing wealth of the rest of us.

This doesn't make any sense to me at all. It defies logic, and yet you cannot turn on a television or radio or open a newspaper or log onto the Internet without hearing this trickle down claptrap trotted out as gospel. Even people who stand to lose the most believe it. People who will have their retirement funds looted by Wall Street pirates, people who will have their taxes increased to pay for yet another round of million dollar bonuses for a bunch of executives who missed the forest for the trees, people whose dreams are being snuffed out by the very people they look to for salvation, still believe with passion that supply side theory is the answer to all our prayers. Prosperity may not trickle down but irony certainly does, and that may be the great tragedy of American politics.

So this is my dilemma. I vote against abortion by voting for Republicans, but the result of Republicans winning elections is an economy that continues to spiral out of control, and the result of that is more abortions, not less. Of course the Republicans can always legislate against abortion, but then there would just be a lot more babies that those same Republicans are going to legislate against feeding, housing, medicating, and employing. It's a quandary.

The Republicans have done a pretty good job of killing the American dream. Even though they are philosophically pro-life, they are now almost as good as the Democrats at killing babies. The Democrats and Republicans need to switch sides on abortion. That way at least my vote can be consistent with my own beliefs. It may not accomplish anything in the grand scheme of things, but at least it will make sense to me.

Dissecting the 'We Are Wall Street' Letter: the most fun you can have in reading glasses

New York Stock Exchange - iconic Wall Street ready to fight back.

 Some of you will have seen this letter. It's been circulating around Facebook for a few days now, proudly touted by those who still buy into the whacky premise of supply side economics as a beautiful rejoinder to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Let's analyze it piece by piece, and see just how beautiful it is. (Original text in blue. My comments in black.)

• We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. Whether it's a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. This much at least is not problematic. Given the timbre of the rest of the letter, the writer is certainly arrogant enough to represent the excesses of Wall Street that we've all grown to despise.
• I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone's 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its [sic] not a problem until you lose. I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas. Also quite true. No one complains when they are winning. The problem here is, of course, that it was just like gambling, except it wasn't supposed to be. No one in their right mind takes their pension fund to Las Vegas. They put it in nice safe diversified mutual funds and money market funds. All the unmitigated risk came from Wall Street. Wall Street took our money to Las Vegas and lost it. Not their money, our money. We didn't give them permission to do it. They didn't ask. But even though they lost our money, they still expected to get their commissions and their fat bonuses. And it gets worse because they didn't just lose our money, they set us up to lose our money and then bet against us. They sold securitized mortgage paper that they knew was crap to our pension funds, lied about how crappy it was, and then invested themselves in short positions on the same crap so that the more money we lost, the more money they made. The biggest and most respected Wall Street firms were found guilty of this kind of fraud. They paid substantial fines and penalties for it—not so substantial that it has slowed them down any, but hundreds of millions of dollars. No one went to jail though. A lot of us Joe Mainstreets think someone should have gone to jail. God knows we would have had we sunk to this level of criminality.
• Well now the market crapped out, and even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are. Scapegoat, my ass. If the shoe fits, bud.
• Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that. Most of us in the 99% work long hours too—at least those of us who still have jobs. Good luck taking jobs away from the 14 million of us who don't have one to take, or the 11 million additional displaced workers who have been forced into early retirement, have fallen off the unemployment rolls, or are underemployed. We don't retire at 50 with a pension either. In fact many of us will be lucky to be able to retire at all after what you bozos have done to our savings. You don't eat what you kill. You kill for sport. You work until 10 at night because your whole life is about racking up points. You don't have friends except at work. Your family plays second fiddle to your job. You come after my plate and you're not going to find the filet steaks and coquilles St. Jacques that you are used to. You are going to find rice and beans. If you try to take it away from me, you are going to end up eating broth and jello at the hospital.
• For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3^rd graders and doing landscaping? Well, yes I do think you are incapable of teaching 3^rd graders and landscaping. I've done both and I've also been a CPA and worked as an accounting executive. I'd rather do accounting. It's easier. It's not as easy as trading hypothetical pieces of fake paper, but it's not nearly so hard as managing a classroom full of eight-year-olds or trying to get rid of a spider mite infestation on a variegated dracaena marginata without killing the plant...or yourself.
  
  

  

  Trading floor of the NYSE where Wall Street is busy saving America from its elementary school teachers.

  
  
• We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much. Wait...what? Cushy? 4 months off? Double time and a half? $5,000 for running a baseball practice? What planet do you live on?
• So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours. Wait...what...again? $85k? Same question with respect to your planet of residence. I drive a 2003 PT Cruiser, which I wash in the driveway with a garden hose. I tip 20-25% when I eat out because that's as much as I can afford. I didn't stop tipping or cut my tipping down when I lost my job because, unlike you, I am not a prick. And here's another thing. Since you make your money off of mine, when my money dries up, so does yours. It doesn't actually work the other way, much as you might wish us to believe that it does.
• The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it's really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom. We lived off the money we worked for. You rejoiced in the money you scammed us out of. What's more the Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee are not going to knock you off the top of the pyramid. You guys paid to put them in office. They are probably going to leave things as they are unless the Occupy Wall Street movement gains so much momentum that they have to sit up and take notice. Where do you think the $2 trillion in bailout and economic stimulus money went? It went to Wall Street. It paid your fat bonus. Conservative pundits are clamoring about Obama's spending spree, but most of the money went right to the top of the pyramid where it stayed. It didn't go to hiring teachers back or putting America back to work. It went into the coffers of asshats and pirates who used some of it to lobby against financial reform and the kind of common sense regulations that would prevent another bubble, bust, and bailout cycle. Obama is your friend. He may not be as good a friend as, say, Rick Perry, but he's done everything you required to maintain the status quo.
• We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply...will he? And will they? Honestly, I don't even know what this means. I think possibly your last hit of cocaine kicked in somewhere in the middle of the paragraph above this one. In fact this whole missive is so disjointed and misinformed that I have decided, arrogant or not, you are not Wall Street at all. You don't know enough about how finance and economics actually work to have ever done time selling securities, vetting market analysis, or timing trends. You are an ignoramus, and you are not taking anything away from me. Besides, someone way smarter than you has already got most of it. 

A Steaming Pile by Any Other Name: Horse and Sparrow Economics

For several weeks now, I have been Tweeting and Facebooking the hell out of something called 'horse and sparrow economic theory' because it is at once so evocative and so descriptive of the bill of goods that has been supply side policy since the Reagan administration. 'Supply side economics' was a term adopted to replace what was, at the time, the more pejorative term, 'trickle down economics'. In either case, the theory was that if you cut taxes for the wealthy they would have more money to save, and part of that savings would be invested in new technology and new productive capacity, which would create new jobs and lift the economy as a whole. In other words a little governmental largess for the wealthiest Americans would eventually trickle down to benefit everyone.

For a while it seemed to work that way. Reagan had inherited an economy that wasn't just stagnant, it was also inflationary. They called it 'stagflation', and while there were lots of theories as to what caused it at the time, it was doggedly resistant to any measures adopted to get out of it. Reagan's solution was across-the-board income tax cuts coupled with a massive increase in defense spending. The math didn't work of course, and Reagan's budget director, David Stockton, got into trouble for saying as much in an interview with Vanity Fair at the time.

Reaganomics, as it came to be called in the press, relied on something called the Laffer Curve to sell the plan. What the Laffer Curve purported to show was that if you lowered tax rates, total tax revenue would actually go up because the taxes saved by individuals and businesses would lead to higher income through investments and thus higher absolute taxes although at a lower rate. This turned out not to be true, and Reagan suddenly had a revenue problem. His spending was going through the roof even though he touted spending cuts, and his tax receipts were taking a nose dive. Turns out you can't arm a nation to the teeth without spending money, and arms to protect us from Soviet missiles that didn't fly straight cost a lot more than food for the poor.

Alan Greenspan, tapped by Reagan to chair a bipartisan commission to fix Social Security, instead fixed Reagan's revenue problem with subterfuge. Purporting to put Social Security back on sound financial footing, he raised Social Security taxes. The additional tax revenues filled federal coffers by effectively reversing Reagan's income tax cuts for middle and lower income wage earners. This was a huge regressive shift in the total tax burden—lightening the load for the rich and increasing the burden for the poor.

Reagan was happy to borrow the Social Security receipts to fund the arms race. He got the Soviets to spend themselves into the poor house, but the apparently serendipitous collapse of the Soviet Union may have created as many problems as it solved. Reagan once famously called the accounting sleight of hand 'revenue enhancement'. For the middle class taxpayers upon whom the burden fell, Reagan's use of the term 'enhanced' is the moral equivalent of using 'enhanced interrogation techniques' to describe torture.

Eventually stagflation went away. Supply side advocates like to point to Reagan's apparent success to sell 'enhanced' trickle down policies today. I would argue that since Reagan actually raised taxes, increased spending, and more than doubled the deficit, supply side philosophy had little to do with the improved economy. A much better case could be made for increased spending as the best way to kick-start a stalled economy.

This is just too Keynesian to be embraced by conservatives though. They are all still firm believers in the supply side formula, even though it has never really worked...not even for Ronald Reagan who is its patron saint. After thirty years, the legacy of supply side policy-making is clearly bubbles, busts, and bailouts. It is time to go back to calling supply side theory by the name it started with—' Horse and Sparrow'. It goes like this: if you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

When the sparrows get tired of the steady diet of the horse's leavings, we will finally see what 'Angry Birds' really look like.

Trickle Down Theory: DooDoo Economics

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