Last week, Mark Thoma wrote, Blow Up the Tax Code and Start Over??? He started it with, “Here we go again with the flat tax proposals.” Of course! Because this is the start of the presidential election and the flat tax is about the only policy the Republicans have that sounds appealing. Of course, it isn’t appealing. As long as people like Rand Paul (the case at hand) stay vague, it all sounds great. It is only when they get down to the details that we see that everyone who makes less than a hundred grand a year will end up paying more in taxes.

The reason that the flat tax sounds so appealing is that everyone thinks that filing taxes is a pain. It is! Even if you just have to file 1040-EZ, it’s still a pain. No one likes paper work. So the idea that we could just write down how much money we made and multiply it by some percentage rate sounds great. But wait: that isn’t what people hate about filing their taxes. No one says, “Oh, I have no problem with all the work I do to figure out my adjusted gross income; but looking up my tax in that table! That’s just terrible!”

So that’s the truth of the matter: the marginal tax rates are absolutely the least onerous part of filing our taxes. And that’s the only thing that would change with a flat tax. And even it wouldn’t be an improvement! What’s harder: looking up a number in a table or multiplying one number with another? I think it’s a wash. So you have to wonder: why are conservatives so all fired excited about the flat tax? There’s no surprise in that answer. As with all efforts by conservatives to “reform” the tax code, the intention is to lower taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor.

This is why conservatives have a laser focus on the federal income tax: it is modestly progressive. State income taxes tend to be pretty flat. State sales taxes are regressive. Property taxes are flat. And the payroll tax — the biggest federal tax on the working poor — is highly (Ridiculously!) regressive. Forget all you hear from libertarians about how great “local control” is. The reason they believe in “local control” is because the poor are usually stuck wherever they are but the rich can move anywhere they want. Thus local governments gouge the poor and let the rich off so as not to cause them to move away.

Thoma noted that even Rand Paul admitted that his flat tax would lower the taxes on the rich. But in order to offset this, Paul claims that the tax loopholes mostly benefit the rich. There is something to that. But it is clear this is just a way for Paul to imply that his flat tax wouldn’t be a giveaway to the rich without having to actually show this. But it’s just perfect: make the one modestly progressive tax in the United State flat because that’s “fair.” But ignore all the other taxes that harm the poor.

Of course, according to Paul, his “Fair and Flat Tax” would create an economic boom. He knows this because he had the people at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation look at his plan. The Tax Foundation may be nonpartisan, but it is conservative — very conservative. Thoma — who is usually pretty restrained — commented, “I bet it would almost be as good for the economy as the Bush tax cuts. Oh wait…” But I think it is amazing that the mainstream media allow Republicans like Rand Paul to talk about the federal income tax to the exclusion of all other taxes. The only people who really care about that tax are the rich. How about we talk about the payroll tax? If we got rid of the cap, maybe we could lower that tax rate.

Perhaps I am stuck in the middle of the 20th century in terms of intellectual thought. But when I look at the great big world, I see most people involved in the process of defining themselves. In its most pernicious form, it is the good “us” versus the bad “them.” But even when it is not done for such negative purposes, it is extremely wasteful. And what’s more, those who have power in a society can easily use this natural tendency to get people behind policies that are quite bad. This is what I see going on in Europe with regard to Greece. Especially in Germany, the prevailing narrative is that the Greek people are corrupt and lazy and if only they acted more like the Germans (By invading Poland?) everything would be okay.

Last week, Simon Wren-Lewis call bunk to all this, The Eurozone’s Cover-Up Over Greece. Over the last five years, the Eurozone has given an enormous amount of money that was nominally for Greece in exchange for austerity policies. But all that money did was hold off default. The money didn’t go to Greece but rather its creditors. If Greece had simply been left to default on its debt in 2010, it would have suffered under roughly the same austerity because it wouldn’t have been able to borrow money. The only difference would be that the banks who had lent money to Greece would have lost it.

The Greek bailout was not a bailout of the country at all, but rather the (mostly) German bankers. I’ve never been able to get my head around this disconnect. After the financial crisis of 2008, everywhere you looked, people were pointing fingers at borrowers. Here in the US it was homeowners who couldn’t afford their mortgages; in southern Europe, it was governments (actually just Greece) who borrowed more than they should have. But anyone who has ever even tried to get a bank loan knows that this is not how it works. The banks are supposed to be the adults who only give out loans to worthy borrowers.

But somehow, the idea that it takes two to tango, has been lost in this discussion. And it is worse than that because we expect borrowers to want more money than they can afford. So it’s pretty amazing that €42 billion have been given away to bankers who were clearly reckless, yet they are never mentioned. They are seen as good and pure — taken advantage of by the evil Greek government, which should have known that it couldn’t afford the loans it was taking.

I pine for the days when people were more class conscious. I blame mass media. If it wasn’t for the constant assault of “respectable” news outlets repeating lies about poor deceived bankers, people would see things more clearly. Remember the founding of the Tea Party: millionaire Rick Santelli surrounded by other millionaires on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, ranting about a law designed to help homeowners. And millions of middle class Americans — most of whom were too old to have been caught up in the housing bubble — jumped on board. There was instant common cause between the bankers and middle class homeowners who just had the good luck of being born at a better time. Or in Germany, there are working stiffs who align with the poor bankers. “Us” and “them” have been sliced and diced by the power elite for the benefit of themselves, so they will never be held accountable and so the money will keep moving from the poor to them.

Tocqueville’s observations about the curious version of democracy that Americans were cultivating in the 1830s have served as a touchstone for social scientists ever since. One sociologist writes about the continued relevance of what Tocqueville noticed way back then, particularly the odd fact that we cherish our commitment to individualism yet experience a “relentless pressure to conform.” Each of us can do what he likes as long as he ends up fundamentally similar to everyone else: You’re “free to expand as a standardized individual.”

A couple of decades ago, that last phrase reminded me of how our pitiful individuality was screwed to the backs of our cars in the form of customized license plates. Today it brings to mind what goes by the name “personalized learning.”

A suffix can change everything. When you attach -ality to sentiment, for example, you end up with what Wallace Stevens called a failure of feeling. When -ized is added to personal, again, the original idea has been not merely changed but corrupted — and even worse is something we might call Personalized Learning, Inc (PLI), in which companies sell us digital products to monitor students while purporting to respond to the differences among them.

Personal learning entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.

Personalized learning entails adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores. It requires the purchase of software from one of those companies that can afford full-page ads in Education Week.

—Alfie Kohn
Four Reasons to Worry About “Personalized Learning”