Government in Wonderland, Part I

I think that eventually we will need a portion of the deficit reduction to come from increased taxes, hopefully as part of tax reform and a flat(ter) tax structure. But the chart above explains the Republicans’ reluctance to raise taxes. We have a spending problem more than a taxing problem. Note that these figures are in steady 2010 dollars. (The dollar is anything but steady—what I am trying to say is that the chart takes into account inflation.) 

Let me begin by criticizing Republicans.  I certainly want to be bipartisan! Returning our defense expenditures to 2001 levels, adjusting for inflation, would still leave us by far with the largest military in the world. It would be more than sufficient to defend us. We need to bring at least a portion of our troops home. Unless we want to keep 50,000 soldiers in Afghanistan permanently, we need to, as Nancy Reagan might put it, just say no.  I thought that was what Obama promised us. 

I was told that if I voted for McCain we would be stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, I held my nose and I voted for McCain. We are still stuck in these wars, so I guess they were right. (This is an update of the old Johnson/Goldwater joke about Vietnam.) 

But even the supposed (I use supposed because no one really knows who is proposing what) Obama proposal is $1 trillion reduction in proposed expenditures over 10 years. If you want each portion of the budget to receive proportionate cuts in order to balance the budget, the correct figure is double that. If you want to return to 2001 levels, then you need to almost triple this proposed cut. (All these numbers that I am using are over ten years.)  If we exempt any portion of the budget from cuts, then other areas have to be cut more. The needed Medicare and Social Security cuts are unpalatable enough without forcing them to be larger. 

Here is what the Reason article from which I took the chart concluded about many Republicans:

At the same time, GOP types need to face the fact that we can't keep spending $700 billion or more on defense while keeping Medicare going full steam ahead and never touching Social Security, which represents a sacred bond by which relatively wealthy old people fleece relatively poor young people. Something has got to give, because we're out of money.

I have to agree. These Republicans are the proverbial ostrich burying its head in the sand. Next time I will talk about their Democratic brother ostriches. 

You Know Its' Got To Be Bad When They Use Your Initials

In keeping with my theme of the Justice System this week I thought that I would write about the strange case of "DSK"—Dominique Strauss-Kahn .  

Strauss-Kahn had everything going for him. He was head of a very important international agency—the IMF (International Monetary Fund). He is married to a very wealthy woman. He was the odds-on favorite to be the Socialist Party candidate for president of France next year. Yet here is what happened to him:

But there was also outrage about the photos of Mr. Strauss-Kahn cuffed in custody. While the so-called “perp walk” (“perp” is short for “perpetrator”) is a New York police tradition, allowing the press to get photographs of a suspect, it is not a tradition in France. In fact, it is against the law. A 2000 French law tries to reinforce the principle of the presumption of innocence by criminalizing the publication of photos of an identifiable person in handcuffs who has not yet been convicted.

The former French justice minister whose name is on the law, Élisabeth Guigou, said she found the photos of Mr. Strauss-Kahn in cuffs indicative of “a brutality, a violence, of an incredible cruelty, and I’m happy that we don’t have the same judiciary system.”

Wikipedia describes a Perp Walk this way:

A perp walk, or walking the perp, is a common custom of American law enforcement, the practice of taking an arrested suspect through a public place at some point after the arrest, creating an opportunity for the media to take photographs and video of the event. The defendant is typically handcuffed or otherwise restrained, and is sometimes dressed in prison garb. Within the United States the perp walk is most closely associated with New York City. Originally only those accused of violent street crimes were subjected to it, but since Rudolph Giuliani had accused white-collar criminals perp-walked in the 1980s it has been extended to almost every defendant. 

It is the way that the media and the prosecutors tell us who is guilty. As Mayor Bloomberg once said “If you don’t want to do the perp walk, don’t do the crime.”

This sets on its head the traditional presumption of innocence for accused people. The perp walk is designed to corrupt and influence the jury pool to make conviction more likely. What matters to our adversarial legal system is not the truth, but winning at all costs. The truth is an early casualty of many trials. Another way you can tell who is guilty is if the media uses the person's middle name. If they do, then they must be guilty!

I do not want to understate the seriousness of the crime on which Strauss-Kahn is accused—rape; but the presumption of guilt is what I am discussing. “He is rich, white, and French—he must be guilty.” The Australian online newspaper had an interesting take on the case:

In their eyes, Dominique Strauss-Kahn had become the grotesque symbol of all that was rotten in the state of patriarchy (and especially in "sexist" France) and therefore not worthy of the minimum presumption of innocence before proved guilty. Willing accomplices to his crime, French women in their entirety were also put in the dock. Who could forget Katha Pollitt in US left-wing bible The Nation scorning "pathetic" French women "rising in defence of their right to be pawed by their bosses" and dismissing French feminism as a "small and conflicted" movement that effectively condones sexual predators. DSK's wife, Anne Sinclair, was a special target of the woman-hating feminist brigade.

Of course you can be a feminist and not go along with this. I was alerted to this link by Wendy McElroy, a feminist. 

Putin and Sarkozy thanks to PhotoshopConspiracy theorists had a field day! Since Vladimir Putin and Sarkozy get along well, immediately it was assumed that Putin had arranged to eliminate a potential rival of Sarkozy from next year's French presidential election. I am amazed by the supposed power of Putin. He is the key figure in a number of supposed conspiracies. In my view Strauss did not help his case by advancing this theory:

Strauss – Kahn announced to his friends that Russia is behind the occurred events, reports Ohtuleht. This was done by the Prime Minister Putin! He is a good friend of Sarkozy and put me behind the bars, forcing me to resign from the IMF, in order to strengthen this friendship, Strauss – Kahn declared.

This seems unlikely. If he is innocent of rape, it is far more likely that a women saw an opportunity to get some money and seized it. With the various inconsistencies in her story, the fact she spoke French and would have more likely to have known who Strauss was, and the mystery of the large cash deposits made to her account by her alleged drug dealing boyfriend make her an unreliable witness. Was she raped? Did she set up Strauss? We do not know. I found it difficult from the beginning to think that a man like Strauss would be so stupid. Then an allegation surfaced that there was an earlier incident years ago and I began to wonder.

An unreliable witness can be raped. Did the arrogance of power make Strauss think he was immune and that the laws only applied to ordinary people? It seems likely that the case will be dropped and Strauss might even still run for President of France. Such accusations did not prevent Bill Clinton from success in politics.

Click here for the latest on the case.

Energy Independence

Charles Hugh Smith at Two Minds had a guest blogger yesterday:

The Bush Administration may have made a strategic error when it chose a primarily military response to 9/11. We’ve spent a couple trillion dollars in the decade since with precious little to show for the expense and effort. Would a national effort to develop renewable energy have had a greater impact? Probably not at the time—the slow pace of technological progress could not have competed with the primal thrill of military conquest.

But the tangible benefits of a renewable energy thrust would certainly be evident by now. Lower dependence on foreign oil imports, the rise of new technologies, the creation of new businesses and new jobs and a sense of a hope for a better future might be apparent today had the leadership of the time embraced the long view. And it could have been accomplished for a fraction of what we’ve paid to date for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The link I posted on Saturday got a lot of discussion on Facebook. One point was that there was an advantage to energy independence and that the Chevy Volt helps in this. I think that energy independence should be a national goal. This will require tariffs, which is not mentioned in the article at Two Minds. A good read anyway. 

The Chevy Volt

I remember being excited about the Chevy Volt. I was wrong. While we want a society that is more sustainable, government environmental policies are part of the problem not part of the solution. The online magazine Liberty Unbound:

The Chevy Volt, to cite one example, can travel 35 miles on its fully charged 16 kWhbattery. Thus, charging the battery by means of the average US power plant creates 19.2 pounds of CO₂; in effect, 0.55 pounds of CO₂ per mile. The EPA rates the Volt's gas-only fuel economy as 37 mpg. Since a gallon of gasoline produces about 19.6 pounds of CO₂ , the Volt produces 0.53 pounds of CO₂ per mile. Incredibly, the Volt's carbon footprint is 0.02 pounds per mile larger when powered by its battery — another electrical mystery.

Sometimes it is the appearance of environmental progress that is more important than the reality. A Volt might make you feel better about yourself, but is does not help the environment. 

The article concludes with this analogy:

This plan is a costly, inane indulgence in fantasy. If the curtain were pulled back, it would reveal a fatuous illusionist, feverishly operating the levers of subsidies, tax credits, and regulatory mandates to orchestrate the scam.

Read the whole article, it is worth your time. 

It’s Where the Money Is

Willie Sutton was a famous bank robber. When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton famously never said, "it is where the money is." 

Willie robbed banks for over 2 million dollars. He was a cunning, inventive thief who almost made you glad he robbed you so you could say he had. He was famous, but the biggest robbery in the history of the world has occurred and very little attention is being paid.

The LA Times reports:

After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born. 

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash

I guess that $2.4 billion will now be called a "Hercules." The auditors are not sure of the amount and the missing money may be ONLY $2.6 billion, a Hercules of Money. I bet you have heard all about this. Or have you? Why do crooks and scoundrels go into government service? (Along with many sincere people I am sure.)

"It's where the money is."