Planet Utah

Contra Elizabeth Warren

A couple of months back, Elizabeth Warren made liberal hearts flutter when she offered the following defense of tax hikes on wealthier individuals:

I hear all this, you know, "Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever." No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory--and hire someone to protect against this*--because of the work the rest of us did.

Let me reduce this argument to its essence: "Our taxes paid for the infrastructure, human capital, municipal services, etc., that made your success possible. So, you have a debt to us...a debt that your current rate of taxation isn't sufficient to cover."

Let me now pull this apart, one plank at a time.

First, Elizabeth Warren is running for U.S. Senate. But the taxes that "the rest of us" pay to faciliate the factory owner's success are predominantly state and local taxes. After all, those taxes are the primary source of funding for local roads, education, police forces, and fire departments. So, the basic premise of Warren's argument might make sense--might, though I still don't think it does (see below)--if she were running for, say, a state or local office and were proposing to raise state or local taxes on upper income earners. In the context of a federal race and federal taxes, though, her argument is a non sequitur.

Second, even though Warren sets up a contrast between "the rest of us" and the factory owner, the factory owner is just like the rest of us in one respect--he or she also pays taxes. For all we know, he or she may have paid sufficient taxes to cover the marginal costs of all of the roads, education, police protection, and so on, required to run a successful factory. If that's the case, the factory owner shouldn't have to pay any additional taxes--not under Warren's logic, anyway.

Third, having interviewed or surveyed over 100 employers who hire entry-level workers, I can share with you one of their common complaints: Workers often come to the job without basic skills--"soft skills," math skills, reading skills, computer skills, etc. Because they didn't learn these skills in school, they have to be trained. By whom? By their employers, of course. So, shouldn't employers receive a credit against their tax obligations for any amount they have to spend on basic education/training? In other words, rather than the factory owner owing "the rest of us" for educating his/her workers, maybe the rest of us owe the factory owner for failing to provide an educated workforce.

Finally, consider a counter-factual: Imagine that for whatever reason, the factory owner decides not to build a factory, not to employ 100 people (just to choose a round number), not to pay them a daily wage, not to provide them with insurance, not to contribute to their retirement, etc. If those 100 people now have no place to work, who is responsible for them? You guessed it--"the rest of us." We have to pay the basic costs of their subsistence, unless we're willing to leave their care to friends, family, and private charity, something only the Ron Pauls of the world support.

That was just a counter-factual, though, that is, we would have to pay these subsistence costs if the factory owner hadn't taken care of that for us. But the factory owner did take care of that for us, thereby relieving us of the burden (not to mention conferring upon us all of the related economic benefits; for example, factory workers will spend their paychecks at the local Target and Wal-Mart, which allows those companies to hire additional workers in our community.)

I don't think Elizabeth Warren bothered to consider the value of the factory owner's contribution to the well-being of his/her employees. Had she done so, I think she might have found that "the rest of us" are in debt to the factory owner, not vice versa.

*If Elizabeth Warren doesn't realize that factory owners ALSO pay huge sums for private security and private fire loss prevention measures, she's probably not qualified to run for Senate.

Facebook...pretty much as stupid as I thought it would be

I joined Facebook several years ago because I wanted to see some pictures taken by a person I know. My account lay dormant for a few years after I saw those pictures, until I finally recommitted a few months back. I thought FB might help me connect with people in Dallas that I didn't know were in Dallas. It hasn't. What it has allowed me to do, though, is read lots of status updates like these (from yesterday):

• Need to iron my shirt for tomorrow.
• Don't feel like cooking...Chinese food it is!
• I'm going to have breakfast at the Victory tomorrow. Of course, I'll ride my bike there too.
• Packing for London. Finally I get to wear the cold weather gear!

I genuinely like each of the people who wrote these updates. But I do not give two squirts of freezing pee about such things. Unfortunately, this is a lot of what Facebook is about. So, much of the time I'm on Facebook, there's a little voice in my head that keeps saying, "Who gives a fuck?" (I've often wondered how fast Facebook would come unspooled if, in addition to the "Like" and "Comment" buttons, there was also a "Who gives a fuck?" button.)

Things get even worse, though, as status updates go from the trivial to the nauseatingly narcissistic. I won't give examples because I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but holy cow...like ourselves much?

So, I'm going to quietly disappear from Facebook until/unless someone posts pictures that I want to see. As I depart, though, I want to offer this sincere farewell: I wish my friends luck finishing that last little bit of milk before it goes bad, I hope the dog snarts again when there's someone else around to see it, and I'm sorry you can't remember your aunt's name. It will come to you.

Footnote: One of the conceits of social media is that all of us have something interesting/important/amusing/insightful to say. I'm guilty of that same conceit--after all, I have this blog, and a Twitter account. But there are degrees of the conceit, and I'm comfortable with my place on the conceit spectrum. However, if you find my stuff no more edifying than the "I just dropped my toast on the peanut butter side--again!!!" status updates, you can walk away...just as I'm doing with Facebook.

FBI profiler and sex crimes expert supports my argument

Her name is Jane Turner. She was discussed and quoted extensively in an article you can find here. Check out this excerpt:

While it isn't known what happened in the shower between McQueary and Sandusky, Turner said that given her expertise it would have been "100 percent normal" for McQueary to freeze, panic and shut down after seeing what he said he saw.

Turner said most adults have never even seen a photo of a man having sexual relations with a young boy, much less witnessed it. Further complicating things, Turner said, was the fact that Sandusky was seen as a role model in the community and someone McQueary had known nearly his entire life.

"You're trying to comprehend something your brain can't handle," Turner said. "You can't rationalize it. Compute it. Handle it. Most people turn around and walk away. And then they try to figure out, 'Oh my God. What the hell did I just see?' The people who say they would go in there and break it up? They're wrong. Nine times out of 10, that's just not how the human brain works."

I'll defend Joe Paterno: UPDATED

Well, everyone's demanding Joe Paterno's head because he called his boss, but not the police, when he received credible information that one of his subordinates had sexually abused a child.

I try to imagine myself in a similar situation. It's actuallyhard to imagine, because the circumstances are so foreign to my everyday experience. It's like asking me to imagine what I'd do if someone broke into my house in the middle of the night. Who knows? I don't have a plan. I guess I'd come up with something on the spot, and I'd hope the something I came up with was the right thing.

Okay, so now I'm imagining that someone has called me at home on a weekend and told me that they witnessed one of my underlings sexually assaulting a child. This is the informational equivalent of plutonium; I've got to handle it with care. Whatever I do from this point forward, lives and reputations are hanging in the balance.

I could call the police, but what if the person who reported the crime to me made a mistake? What if they had some ax to grind against my subordinate? What if the situation is more complicated than it appears? The police can ALWAYS be brought in, say, in a day or two...but bringing them in immediately is a decision that can't be undone.

On the other hand, if there really was a crime committed, the police should be called immediately. Or should they? Is that what the family of the boy would want? Maybe they would want it kept out of the papers. Should I try to contact them first? 

I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. I've never had to deal with anything like this before, and I'm flying blind.

You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to call my boss and let him deal with it. He gets paid to deal with stuff like this, not me. I'll call him and make it his problem. He'll know what to do.

UPDATE: Now that Paterno's actually been fired, there are plenty of calls, too, for the firing of Mike McQueary, the guy who saw Jerry Sandusky sodomizing a 10-year-old in the shower and went to Joe Paterno instead of the police. Let me make a point about McQueary that's similar to the one I made about Paterno: A normal, human reaction to such a situation is to experience shock, distress, confusion, doubt, anger, disgust, fear, and concern. Obviously, not having experienced those things ourselves, and knowing the full details of the story as it ultimately played out, it's easy for us, many years later, to identify the right thing to have done: call the police immediately. Because McQueary and Paterno didn't do that, we condemn them. In the moment, though, I think McQueary's and Paterno's responses, actions, and inactions were understandable.

(Not right, but understandable. I guess I'm just finding the Monday morning quarterbacking pretty distasteful. Paterno, McQueary, et al., aren't victims here, but they are being treated as if they covered up child sexual abuse. They did not.)