In general, I’ve avoided the issue of the acceptability of the New York Police officers turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at the two recent funerals. The main reason is simply that the act of the officers struck me as so incredibly immature that I couldn’t bring myself to discuss the deeper issue. It didn’t help that the issue itself is difficult. But I think I have to side with the police officers’ rights, even if I don’t side with the officers themselves, who I think are generally a bunch of whining pussies who should have gone into cosmetology rather than police work.

The argument against the right of officers to stage such a protest is that they are in uniform. I think it is sad that this is an argument that I hear a lot from liberals. But I don’t see how this really matters. This kind of thinking is what has caused jobs to become more and more all encompassing as time has gone on. The end result are things like employees being on call at all times and having to submit to credit checks when applying for jobs. It’s all nonsense.

In the modern world, we all need to have jobs. It simply isn’t the case that one can “go west” and make his living by farming some unused piece of land. All the land is owned and the poor are not born with capital. But more and more, having a job — even a crummy one — is dependent upon a worker’s being the “right kind” of person. In fact, having a saving account and a room rental are too. Our entire society is now set up so that those who most need a job have the hardest time finding one. And once in a job, the worker is expected to give his entire life to it. Just “putting in the time and getting the work done” is not enough.

Personally, I find the tradition of police officers showing up at funerals in uniform offensive. But it is part of a larger tradition of turning police officers into heroes. The recent meme that “blue lives matter” was a joke. Everyone knows that the society as a whole holds up police lives as higher than ordinary lives, and this is made official in law. I do not accept this. I do not think police should attend funerals in uniform. But these are separate issues. The fact remains that these officers are off duty and thus have every right to act like the immature pussies they are.

I don’t think the optics matter either. It is hard to tarnish the reputation of police departments at this point. Not allowing highly intelligent people on the force? Killing 12-year-old boys with nary a thought? Generally seeing the non-police population as subhuman criminals? These sorts of things have already tarnished the police far more. The only people who seem to have a high opinion of the police are the police themselves and others who have had little interaction with them.

Today at Political Animal, Charles Ellison brought my attention to a similar case where a fire chief was suspended and then discharged for things he wrote in a Christian book, Who Told You That You Were Naked? There are some vile, anti-gay things in the book. But it is his right. Unless there is some indication that he doesn’t fight fires as aggressively for the LGBT community, I don’t see the problem.

To me, the bigger problem is why it is that our police and fire departments seem to be filled with a lot of simpleminded bigots who don’t see themselves as servants of the people but as their betters. Of course, I’m much more concerned about anonymous workers’ rights that are commonly being trampled on than these well represented workers’ rights to offend the civilian population. But the issue is that we need to expand all workers’ rights and not focus on reducing the rights of the small number of workers who still have them.

Update (16 January 2015 7:03 pm)

Before someone counters me, I should be clear. The specific issue is that police are allowed to wander around in their uniforms when they are not on duty. If there is an issue with a police protests during a funeral, it should be that the police are allowed to attend the funeral in uniform. At any such event, there are paid representatives. They should not be allowed to “protest” in this way. The police need to get a much better sense (as the military has) that they are under civilian command. I am no friend of the police, but I am a friend of workers. And police are workers. And they need to act like it.

One of the most loved policy ideas of conservatives is the flat tax. This is an idea that shows up from at least one Republican presidential hopeful each and every time we go through the process. And in many cases, the flat tax is the primary focus of the campaign. The most recent example of this was Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, which consisted of a 9% business transaction tax, 9% personal income tax, and 9% federal sales tax. This sounds to me very much like a 27% flat tax, which is undoubtedly a lot more than most people pay at the federal level. But it would thrill the rich in various ways such as destroying the estate tax and allowing the rich to spend huge amounts of money outside the United States without having to pay sales taxes.

The reason that conservatives are focused so much on federal taxes is because that’s the only level at which our tax system can have any amount of progressivity. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan was actually a whole lot more progressive than most such plans. This is because his plan would get rid of the payroll tax, which is the most regressive tax in the nation. But I always figured that once the details of the plan came out, it would be revealed that the plan was yet another giveaway to the rich.

At the sate and local levels, things are already to the liking of the rich — and thus the conservatives. I’m not sure just how true it is, but the conventional wisdom is that states must keep taxes down on the rich because they can so easily move to a low tax state. I’m sure this happens, but a much bigger issue seems to be companies running to low-regulation states. But this ends up with states providing only the most minor progressivity in their income tax code. For example, when I lived in Oregon, there were only two marginal tax rates: 7% and 9%. And that’s saying nothing of other advantages the rich have, the the regressivity of other less visible taxes.

Yesterday, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) released a report, Who Pays: A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All Fifty States. It provides a great interactive map that shows the percentage of income that families pay in taxes for each state. And it ain’t pretty. Consider Texas, for example. Families in the bottom 20% of earners pay 12.5% of their incomes in state and local taxes while families in the top 1% pay 2.9%. That’s right: the poor pay over four times as much in state and local taxes as the rich. But it isn’t just in the south or in red states. Washington state is even worse with the bottom 20% paying 16.8% and the top 1% paying just 2.4% — a seven fold difference. Even California — the best by far — taxes the bottom 20% of families 10.5% and the top 1% of them 8.7%.

So here is the average for all the states and the District of Columbia. Notice that at every level, the more you make, the less you pay. And the top 1% goes way down. I assume that we would see an even steeper decline for the top 0.1% and 0.01%. And it is these people who tend to pay very little taxes at the the federal level as well: they pay almost no payroll taxes and most of their “income” is taxed at 15% as capital gains.

What I find most amazing is that this is something you never hear about on Fox News or any other conservative outlet. If fairness really was what was driving the conservative obsession for a flat tax, they would be appalled about the situation in the states. But the truth is that conservatives know exactly what is going on in the states. They know that taxation is regressive there, and they are fine with that. It is only the federal income tax that makes our overall tax system slightly progressive. And that’s why they want to create the flat or “fair” tax: because they know that will put far more of a tax burden on the poor than on the rich.

You really owe it to yourself to read the executive summary of the report. It lays out all you really need to know about the issue. For example, the reasons that the poor and middle class get taxed so much is not because of income taxes, which are usually slightly progressive. The regressivity comes in because of sales, excise, and property (think: car) taxes. Similarly, the states that advertise themselves for their “low taxes” are also the states with the highest taxes on the poor. For example, in Texas, your taxes really will be low (about 5%) if you are in the top 20% of earners. On the other hand, if you are in the upper middle class (second highest quintile), your taxes will be about the same as they are in California. And if you are middle class or below, California taxes you a lot less. So “low tax” actually means “low tax on the rich.”

Don’t expect to hear anything about this on the nightly news. But you will hear what happened on Wall Street today. We have to have our priorities. And our priorities are those of the rich.

I am on record about my own racist impulses. This is not as brave a statement as it may seem, because I think that all humans are racist — or perhaps “xenophobic” is a better term. But the truth is that there is a distinct difference between people who actively fight their racist impulses (or are at least embarrassed by them) and people who accept them as nothing more than a clear eyed representation of the truth. In my experience, this latter group is relatively small. And when I talk about our country being racist, I am not really talking about these people. All peoples have a small but significant fraction who are bigoted and hateful.

But this does create a bit of a problem when discussing someone like Louisiana Representative and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. You have probably heard about the controversy of him giving a speech to a White Nationalist group back in 2002. And before and after that time, he voted against establishing a Martin Luther King Jr Day. But this morning, Scott Wong at The Hill reported, Minutes Highlight Scalise Efforts to Kill Resolution Apologizing for Slavery. This was back in 1996 — a little more than three decades after the Voting Rights Act.

It’s worse than that, though. Scalise clearly doesn’t get it. According to a news report at the time, Scalise said, “Why are you asking me to apologize for something I didn’t do and had no part of? I am not going to apologize for what somebody else did.” No one was asking for him specifically to apologize. He was a representative of the state and such bills are symbolic like naming schools. But Scalise also doesn’t seem to have a clue about white privilege, which is doubtless why his claim not to have noticed that he was speaking to a racist group is credible.

But it turns out that this bill was originally meant to apologize for slavery. But another great Republican, David Vitter, got the author of the bill to change it from “apologize” to “regret”:

Because, the state can’t admit it was guilty for allowing slavery! It had to admit only that, almost a century and a half after slavery, the state of Louisiana thought the whole thing “regrettable.” But even that was a bridge too far for Scalise. The whole thing is truly amazing. But sadly, it is not surprising.

The Republican Party is a racist organization. By that I don’t mean that like all of us, it has unfortunately and involuntary xenophobic tendencies. I mean that the party depends upon racism for its political power. That’s not to say that all or even most Republicans are especially racist — or overtly so. But it does mean that the difference between the Republican Party being a regional power and a national power is its appeal to overtly racist voters.

I don’t see how the House Republicans can continue to claim that Steve Scalise isn’t a racist after this report. Of course, I didn’t see how they could before this. I suspect that this report will mostly be ignored. The people who are willing to admit that Scalise is a bigot have long been convinced. And the Republican Party, with its large appeal to racists, is unlikely to change course. In fact, I expect to see the Republicans claiming that the “liberal” media is ganging up on poor Steve Scalise. And maybe they will have a point. After all, it’s been clear for almost two decades what Scalise is all about.

Last week, Brendan O’Neill over at the racist National Review argued, Islamophobia Is a Myth. It is charmingly subtitled, “Why do liberals fear the working class and ignore anti-Semitic murder? Because they are bigots.” It’s a curious argument. But it is also entirely typical of the magazine that Buckley built; it has a long history of claiming that other people are elitists; they, of course, are the friends of the working man!

Regardless, this twisted logic is exactly the same as the “black on black” crime canard, “We can’t even discuss the police killing black men until there is no black crime!” And speaking of which, I did a little back of the envelope calculation based upon the data I found in a really vile article. According to the data, which look legit, Jews were 40 times as likely to be the target of hate crimes as white people — weighted for their population. But Muslims were 10 times as likely. And notably, African Americans are 20 times as likely to be targeted for a hate crime. The writer of the article, of course, never took into account the populations of the groups.

But O’Neill’s argument doesn’t make any sense regardless of how much violence is directed toward Muslims and Jews. Since when do liberals ignore antisemitic violence, much less murder? What’s more, hate crimes against Jews was down very slightly since 9/11. They are up substantially against Muslims since 9/11 — and they were even higher for Muslims than they were for Jews in 2001. I know that I’m concerned about hate crimes against everyone. And I am particularly concerned about hate crimes against Jews. I also think that many of the people committing hate crimes against Jews are the same people who are committing them against Muslims.

O’Neill’s argument seems to be that concern is a limited resource. If we are concerned about a racist backlash against Muslims after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, that must mean we have reduced our concern about racism committed against Jews. That kind of limited supply of empathy and concern may be a defining characteristic of conservatives generally, and National Review writers specifically, but it isn’t the way liberls’ minds work.

O’Neill’s ultimate argument comes down to this, “[T]he idea that there is a climate of Islamophobia, a culture of hot-headed, violent-minded hatred for Muslims that could be awoken and unleashed by the next terror attack, is an invention.” It seems to be O’Neill who is the one who thinks the worst of working people, because I don’t imagine them as the ones going out attacking Muslims or Jews or anyone else. I imagine angry bigots who normally keep their hatred in check. But the idea that this does not get inflamed is refuted by this graph:

What the article comes down to is a bizarre kind of apologetic. There apparently aren’t enough hate crimes committed against Muslims for O’Neill to care. The fact that there is a six-fold increase in the number of these hate crimes and actual data indicating that terrorist attacks can make them spike, doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter, because Muslims don’t matter to National Review. Similarly, Jews don’t matter to National Review. And the working classes absolutely doesn’t matter to National Review. They are all just props to be used to beat up on liberals. Their real beef is that liberals care about a minority group that conservatives want to marginalize. The William F Buckley of 1957 would understand completely.

Just yesterday, I was discussing the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), Full Employment Won’t Reverse Income Inequality. And this morning, Sam Seder interviewed Karl Widerquist about the very same issue on The Majority Report. Widerquist is brilliant, but probably not the best advocate for the BIG. That wasn’t the problem with the show, however. The problem was Seder who remained amazingly resistant to the idea.

His complaint, that he talked about long after Widerquist had left, seems to be that he thinks it sounds too good to be true. Somehow, it must all be complicated and perhaps even a Trojan horse to destroy the welfare state. But that isn’t what it is all about. The BIG would be a way of creating a new welfare state — a more humane welfare state. And the BIG would be the basis of it. The trap that Seder is falling into is that he’s hearing a lot of different ideas for how the BIG could be structured. That’s because a lot of really smart people are working on it. There are lots of ways to implement it.

Think of it like universal healthcare. Pretty much everyone agrees that it would be the most efficient way to structure our healthcare system — even conservatives so long as it isn’t a realistic possibility. There, everyone is covered. It’s simple. That’s the idea with BIG: everyone gets a basic income. Seder seems to think that it would be too expensive to give it to everyone and so it would too have to degenerate into a means tested program. This isn’t true. You could just give people the BIG check every month and tax it back gradually from anyone who makes more than it. There’s no need for an extra bureaucracy — we already have the IRS and this would simply be a change in the tax rules and nothing more.

There are potential problems with the BIG. But these probably just reflect the fact that I have not studied the issue carefully. My biggest concern is the disincentive to work. In particular, I would not want to see low wage workers face very high marginal tax rates because the government chips away from their BIG as much as they are making by working. As I discussed three years ago (!) in, Catch 22 for Poor in America, this is already a problem with people who get assistance. There are solutions to this in the case of healthcare, food, and cash assistance. In fact, Obamacare has already fairly well taken care of the healthcare problem. Regardless, there are solutions to these problems for the current situation and the same solutions would apply to the BIG.

I’m sure that I’ll be writing a lot more in the future about BIG. It’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve realized that a guaranteed income really is critical to our major economic problems. But it bothers me that Sam Seder is so skeptical. And to make matters worse, he took a call from a “left” libertarian who was very positive about the BIG. But he mentioned that the BIG would allow us to get rid of food stamps. I don’t necessarily think that’s true. We may want to provide the BIG only to adults and provide more traditional programs for families. Or to provide benefits to children through the school system. There are a lot of options. And we should be discussing these, because I’m sure there are libertarians who would like to use the BIG to destroy rather than strengthen the safety net.