Corporate Income Tax & the Double Taxation Myth

Posted on 20 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

There is something that rich people and their apologists talk about a lot. It is the idea that the corporate income tax is wrong because the owners of those corporations have to pay income tax twice: once for the company and once for the individual. Dean Baker provided the standard response to this nonsense, The Myth of the Corporate Income Tax as Double Taxation. Basically, it comes down to this: no one is forcing people to set up their businesses as corporations. People do it knowing that they will have to pay corporate income taxes. And they do it anyway, because they get a great deal of benefit — most especially protection against liability.

But there are several other things that I don’t understand about this whining point of the rich. The first is, “Corporations are people, my friend.” Corporations have First Amendment rights. Why shouldn’t such an entity have to pay income taxes? Really, I don’t get it. This whole discussion seems to be the usual thing where the rich want all the advantages of whatever they have, but none of the responsibilities. And since they only talk to each other, they get the idea that somehow it makes sense their corporate status should give them all kinds of benefits that other business people don’t get, but that they shouldn’t have to pay anything for it.

The rich and their apologists know that it makes no sense to complain about the corporate income tax. In fact, as Dean Baker noted, “The corporate income tax is a 100% voluntary tax…”

Let’s consider a little thought experiment. Let’s suppose that I hire you as a maid. I don’t pay you with my pre-tax salary; I pay you with my post-tax salary. I get paid and I pay my taxes. With the money left over, I pay you, and you too have to pay income taxes. How is this any different? The reason that corporations have these special rights is that they are a special kind of person. From the profits of the corporations, shareholders are paid. The fact that they don’t do any work (unlike the maid) doesn’t change things; they are being paid because they put money into the company. So yeah, this is double income tax — just like it is when anyone hires someone else.

But what I really don’t get is the Shakespeare aspect of this, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” What does it matter that we call these two taxes the corporate and individual income taxes? I’m being taxed all the time. I make money and I pay income and payroll taxes on it. Then I spend the money and I pay consumption taxes. The big issue here is that the rich are laser focused on the federal income tax.

I’ve talked about this a lot, most recently in, Why We Only Talk About the Income Tax. We have a system where property taxes are very slightly regressive (the poor pay more than the rich). Consumption taxes are quite regressive. And payroll taxes are ridiculously regressive. The income tax is the only part of the tax system that is even moderately progressive. So we talk talk talk about the income tax.

The rich and their apologists know that it makes no sense to complain about the corporate income tax. In fact, as Dean Baker noted, “The corporate income tax is a 100% voluntary tax…” It’s a tax they complain about paying, but they aren’t required to pay it. But it’s the usual whining point of the rich about everything: they don’t believe they should have to pay for anything they get. They want special privileges that other people and businesses don’t get, but they think it shouldn’t cost them anything.

I’ve long been in favor of eliminating the corporation — especially when I was a libertarian. So I say we give the rich what they want: repeal the corporate income tax — right along with the corporation as a legal entity. Do I have any takers?

Image of Dean Baker cropped from official photo at CEPR. Licensed under Fair Use.

The Middle Ground on Healthcare Reform

Posted on 20 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

Hillary Clinton I’ve come to be pretty tired of the Clinton and Sanders camps sniping at each other — especially over healthcare reform. It’s hard for me to be objective, of course, because I am a Bernie Sanders supporter. But I do think more sniping comes from the Clinton camp. It isn’t a question of total sniping. But there is a whole lot more institutional sniping by Clinton supporters. And I understand it: she’s the establishment candidate for a reason: she’s the safe choice. And as a Sanders supporter, I have to admit: I don’t see much in the way of policy differences between the two once they are in office. We live in a democracy, not a autocracy. So I wish everyone would just cut it out.

But there are substantive differences between the candidates that are worth talking about. Healthcare reform is the big one: the “fix Obamacare” approach and the “replace Obamacare with single payer” approach. What I don’t understand is why these have to be different. As you all know, I’m very happy with Obamacare, Covered California: I Died and Woke Up in Canada. I certainly would prefer a universal, single-payer system. Obamacare is a complicated mess. And I don’t really see why I had to decide between the bronze and silver plans. Like I’m in any way qualified to know what is best for me! But that’s the way our neoliberal system works.

“Getting universal Medicare would require overcoming opposition not only from insurers and drug companies, but doctors and hospital administrators, both of whom are paid at levels two to three times higher than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.” —Dean Baker

Still, it seems to me that Obamacare is single-payer just waiting to happen. For this discussion, forget people who get their insurance through their employers. For one thing, it makes this all easier to think about. But more important, I think that now that we have Obamacare, employer provided health insurance will (Quite rightly!) become a thing of the past. It will probably take twenty years, but eventually, healthcare just won’t be provided in that way. It’s existence is a fluke of history anyway.

So we have a system now in three parts: Medicaid for the poor, Medicare for the old, and the Exchanges for everyone else. Currently, Medicaid provides free healthcare to those making up to 133% of the poverty level. (Because of John Roberts, this isn’t true in most red states, but that will change over time.) What I want to know is why we can’t change the Medicaid level. Why not increase it to 150%? Or 400% (the level where government subsidies end on the exchanges)? Or why can’t we lower the age for Medicare? How about 60 years old as a cutoff? For people like me who want “Medicare for all,” this seems obvious. Whenever the Democrats get control of the government, they can increase the number of people who qualify for Medicare and Medicare. And eventually, you end up with a universal, single-payer healthcare system.

Bernie Sanders As far as I can tell, there is only one objection to this healthcare reform plan: it isn’t realistic. But it is more realistic than simply jumping to a full out single-payer healthcare system. And it has the advantages of being a gradual process — one where the insurance companies can gradually move into other areas. But even more than that, our healthcare problems are a lot bigger than our fragmented private insurance market.

Dean Baker recently wrote, Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, and Medicare for All. He noted, “Getting universal Medicare would require overcoming opposition not only from insurers and drug companies, but doctors and hospital administrators, both of whom are paid at levels two to three times higher than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.” And that’s important. The country needs to get used to the fact that our idiosyncrasies have distorted our system such that healthcare reform is complicated. And it is going to take time on a lot of fronts to deal with this. There is no quick fix.

So in a sense, I agree more with Hillary Clinton about healthcare reform. But I know a little bit about negotiation. And if Clinton is talking about the very reasonable idea of making Obamacare work better and having it cover more people, the most likely result will be that nothing will change. But Sanders’ unreasonable push for single-payer healthcare right now is much more likely to result in good changes to Obamacare. Let’s not forget that Obama ran in 2008 on the unreasonable idea that we didn’t need an individual mandate. We didn’t get his more liberal plan, but we did get a plan that is providing me with healthcare and dental insurance at negligible costs.

None of this means that Clinton is bad. But similarly, none of this means that Sanders is unrealistic. I’ll proudly support either of them.

Morning Music: Big Jesus Trash Can

Posted on 20 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

Well, in our trip down Nick Cave’s career, we come to the last album of The Birthday Party, Junkyard. Like so often with great bands, this last album is when they really gel. Of course, in their case, that means they go totally crazy. It is amazing to listen to. Yesterday, I said that Prayers on Fire was post-punk. This album is… who knows?! Some of it sounds like free jazz. And then it’s straight rhythm and blues. And sometimes psychedelic — but taken by goths. Today we listen to “Big Jesus Trash Can.”

It’s a very consistent album. It has an emotional core of wry despondency. My favorite track is the most straightforward one, “Several Sins.” But it is by Rowland S Howard (maybe I’ll do a week of him sometime). “Big Jesus Trash Can” is a masterpiece of noise as music. I never much cared for noise bands, but that’s because they rarely managed to turn it into music. Here The Birthday Party does.

In “Big Jesus Trash Can,” it is hard to say what Cave is on about. There are various ways of interpreting it. It is hard for me not to see it in the context of the modern American Christian conception of Jesus as this Rambo sort of character. Certainly there seems to be some kind of statement about America being so Christian and yet so militaristic. But the main thing is the sound:

BirthdayPartyJunkyard. Licensed under Wikipedia.

Anniversary Post: Iranian Hostages Released

Posted on 20 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

Iranian Hostages Released On this day in 1981, the remaining 52 hostages were released by the Iranian government after 444 days. This was also the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated fortieth President of the United States. For years, this has been part of the Republican myth that Carter was weak and Reagan strong. Indeed, just last weekend, Marco Rubio was on Meet the Press, where he made the de rigueur Republican claim that the world only respects and fears America when a dry mouthed Eagle Scout brays and beats his chest. He said, “When I become president of the United States, our adversaries around the world will know that America is no longer under the command of someone weak like Barack Obama, and it will be like Ronald Reagan, where as soon as he took office the hostages were released from Iran.”

If you look at the timeline of the Iranian hostages crisis, you will see that the Carter administration was not sitting on its hands. The first attempts at negotiation were on 7 November 1979 — three days after the attack on the embassy. The Iranians would not meet with the US, so Carter froze their assets. Originally, there were 66 hostages taken. On 17 November 1979, Iran released all the female and African American hostages — reducing the number down to 53. On 11 July 1980, another hostage was released due to illness. That left the 52 who were released on 20 January 1981.

On 12 September 1980, Iran declared that they would release the hostages if the Shah’s assets were given to Iran and if Iran’s assets were released. The Iranians went to the Carter administration that month with the offer to negotiate. From then through January of 1981, Warren Christopher led the US delegation in negotiations with the Iranians. On 19 January, a deal was settled — the Iranian hostages were exchanged for roughly $10 billion in Iranian assets. And the next day, the hostages were released.

According to PolitiFact (which has debunked this claim before because Republicans so like it), there were a couple of reasons for the Iranian hostages release. First, the Iranians were tired of keeping the hostages. They had to take care of them and keep them from escaping — at the same time having to worry about an American attack, which would have been widely seen as justified. Second, they had been negotiating for months and they didn’t want to start all over with a new administration. And third, the Iranians wanted to insult Carter as the symbol of the United States.

It’s interesting how often Republicans align themselves with enemies of this country just to score cheap domestic political points. Remember Tom Cotton’s ridiculous letter to the Iranians that totally disrespected the office of the president just to make a grand statement? Remember what the letter actually communicated: you should not trust the United States of America.

As for the Iranian hostages deal, no one from Ronald Reagan’s administration took any part in the negotiations. The deal was finalized because of negotiations with the Carter administration. And it was all about money. Nothing else. Rubio is an idiot. But that’s what Republicans are. In 2012, Mitt Romney said the same thing. That’s because chest thumping is the extent to which Republicans think about foreign policy.

Iran hostages return by Don Koralewski – DOD Media via DOD DN-SN-82-07899. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

How to Play Chess or at Least Understand It

Posted on 19 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

Chess When I was in grammar and secondary school, I found myself playing a lot of games of chess. I never won a single game. I had no idea what I was doing.

When it comes to chess, there are two kinds of people. First, there are people who know how to play. Second, there are people who know the moves. Explaining the moves is what passes for teaching the game. But this is not teaching. Imagine a similar approach to teaching tennis: one person serves, the two players hit the ball back and forth, the first one to hit the ball outside the lines loses; have fun!

I’ll admit: I’m a slow learner. But that’s really the critical element that distinguished the good grammar school players from the bad: a basic understanding of what the game was about. Someone who figured it out for themselves was necessarily a far better player, even if they weren’t a very good player in an absolute sense. And even they would be greatly helped by better chess instruction because it would result in them having better opponents.

When I was in graduate school, I decided to learn how to play chess. But I didn’t turn to any how-to books. I had seen them in the past and they made no sense to me whatsoever. Instead, I picked up a book of games by some chess grandmaster I had never heard of. And I studied those games. In particular, I went move by move and tried to figure out why the chess masters did not make the cunning moves that I had in mind.

If you’ve ever looked at these books, you will notice that there is very little annotation. What annotation there is is for moves that really good players would have questions about. The moves that I thought were correct were never what was played. And the annotations made no sense to me because they discussed issues that were far beyond me.

If you are playing chess hoping that your opponent will make a mistake, you are playing wrong. Chess, when properly played, is a game where you win or lose by inches.

But very slowly I was able to figure out why my moves sucked and why the masters moved the way that they did. And one day — quite suddenly — I understood chess as a game. That didn’t mean that I knew how to play. I still hadn’t started playing. But I got it. I could, for the first time, enjoy the game as a game. (For the record, I believe most people who watch professional sports understand those games at about the same level that I understood chess before my epiphany.)

Once I started playing the kind of people who had destroyed me when I was young, I saw the problem. They understood things like double attacks and traps. And at that point, the game was kind of funny. I would sit across from someone and they would set up a trap for me. And I could see it in their eyes: they were thinking, “Oh please! Oh please!” The truth was, they didn’t really understand the game much better than I had. If you are playing chess hoping that your opponent will make a mistake, you are playing wrong. Chess, when properly played, is a game where you win or lose by inches.

To give you an example, I happened to go to graduate school with a postdoc who was a really good chess player — a near master lever player, despite his drinking, womanizing, and research. He taught me much during the course of destroying me in game after game. But he told me a story about playing against Joshua Waitzkin (The kid in Searching for Bobby Fischer) at some point in a simultaneous exhibition. And my friend had found himself in the highly unusual position of having the advantage after about 20 moves. But my friend lost. And afterward, the kid (probably about 19 then) sat there with him and went over the whole game and each point where my friend made slightly less than the optimal move. That is the nature of chess.

But I still find it annoying that no one ever thought to teach me the game of chess. I was often forced to play in school. But it was a drag. It was like being forced to go to a museum where nothing was explained and no context was given. Chess can be an incredibly creative game. Of course, I never could have been much of a chess player. I’m just not that competitive. But being able to appreciate the game has been edifying, which is all I want from anything that I do.

Afterword

Some might think of Waitzkin going over the game after my friend lost to be something of a jerk move. That was not how my friend presented the story. The kid was at once showing appreciation for a player good enough to give him a bit of trouble and also providing him with a little chess lesson.

Image cropped from Esprit de Corps by Evonne. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

How to Write Like a Serial Killer

Posted on 19 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

Writing I love that title. It would make a good book title. But then I started thinking about what I would write, and it was mostly about what a fool the reader was for buying a book on writing. Don’t get me wrong. I love books on the finer points of writing. But I hate books about how to write in a general sense: “How to Write a Best Selling Mystery.” That stuff just disgusts me. The best writing advice is to stop reading whatever writing advice you are reading and go out and write!

Just the same, I think that the art of writing is fundamentally the art of reading. What writers most often lack is a sense of what is good and what is not. I remember many years ago, I wrote a short screenplay — for what would be maybe a 20-minute film. It was about this guy who was addicted to messing with telemarketers. I loved it. It was very funny with a great denouement. But a writing friend of mine hated it. I forget exactly what she didn’t like about it, but I am convinced that it was nonsense — something about realism, as though that matters in the least.

But as an insecure writer, I took the advice and wrote draft after draft. And with each draft, it got worse and worse. And my friend never liked it because she just didn’t like the whole idea of it. By the end, it was a mess with far too much motivation and far too little fun. But it is a good example of the life cycle of a piece of writing. There were many drafts before I showed it to my friend. And that was the point at which it was as good as it would ever be. The problem with the following rewriting was that it was at base about making the screenplay into something it wasn’t.

This bit of it really struck me, “Contrary to mythology, it is not high intelligence that makes serial killers successful. Instead, it is obsession, meticulous planning…” Ah, I think I understand that! This is what writers need!

Knowing when to stop is critical to the writing process. You must know when something works. New writers tend to think that everything they write is golden. There is rarely any point in rewriting because they can’t tell what crap they are writing — even though they can often tell this in other people’s writing. This is what we can probably call “kiddie writing.” There’s an obvious solution to this: read a lot more great writing and write a lot more of whatever it is you are capable of.

But not knowing when to stop can also mean endless revisions — never stopping. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t tell what good writing is; it often means you can tell, but you just aren’t a good enough writer (Yet!) to accomplish the kind of work that you know is possible. This we can probably call “middling writing.” And I don’t mean to disparage it, because it is usually pretty good. It’s always important to read great writers, but clearly the issue here is to keep writing. But that means different writing projects, not beating a work to death trying to perfect it. If you find you are in your sixtieth rewrite, it is time to set it aside and try something new.

And that brings us to serial killers. I read an article the other day, 5 Myths about Serial Killers and Why They Persist. This bit of it really struck me, “Contrary to mythology, it is not high intelligence that makes serial killers successful. Instead, it is obsession, meticulous planning…” Ah, I think I understand that! This is what writers need!

In as much as I can write, it is because I have been writing like a serial killer for decades. I’m obsessed with it. I know lots of people who used to be far better writers than I was and now they have nowhere near my skill. It’s because they don’t care about writing like I do. And they are better off for it! But if you want to write, you need to write. And you need to write a lot.

In 1985, Frank Gilroy (father of Tony, Dan, and John) made a film called The Gig. It’s really good. Yet it is totally wrong about the way that expertise works. In particular, there is a trumpet player who has a nice cushy life. He’s a professional-level player, but he’s not interested in being a professional musician, because it sucks as a lifestyle. Then there is a clarinet player who practices and practices but will never play at a professional level. And there is a great line in the film, said by the one professional musician in the film to the clarinet player, “It’s not religion — devotion isn’t enough.”

This is a common idea that has been beaten to death by writers who really should know better. Now it is true that there are limits. Regardless of how hard I work, I will never be David Foster Wallace. But anyone can become a professional writer. You just have to be like a serial killer. It really has to matter to you. Being a natural doesn’t take you very far at all. But it might make you more inclined to do all the work that you need to do to become something really worthwhile.

Afterword

I always feel a little weird talking about this kind of stuff on Frankly Curious because the writing here is pretty much all first draft. This is stuff that I knock off without much thought. I usually have only the vaguest of ideas about what I’m going to write before I start. And if things go sideways, I usually let them. I’m actually a much better writer than any article here would indicate. But I’m not a great writer. What I am is a garden-variety professional writer. But people have been paying me to write for almost 25 years now — back in the days when I couldn’t write nearly as well as I do now — when my final drafts were worse than my first drafts today. It doesn’t take much to be a professional writer.

Image cropped from Pen Writing Notes via Pexels. Licensed under CC0 Public Domain.

Morning Music: Nick the Stripper

Posted on 19 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

Well, I told you we would get to Nick Cave eventually. Kind of. Today we listen to another song by The Birthday Party. But at least this one is written by Cave. This song is off their album, Prayers on Fire. And it is called “Nick the Stripper.” I can’t say that it’s an example of good songwriting. But it’s a hell of a song.

“Nick the Stripper,” I would have to say, is post-punk. It has a great bass and drum part that is reminiscent of Gang of Four. On the other hand, the guitar is all over the place — post-punk at times and sixties San Francisco rock at others. Then there’s the great horn sounds. And Nick Cave’s unique contributions to singing that are not so much music as failed attempts at throat singing.

The whole thing is hypnotic and amazing. No wonder this group wasn’t successful!

TheBirthdayPartyPrayersOnFire. Licensed under Wikipedia.

Anniversary Post: I Love Lucy Goes to the Hospital

Posted on 19 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1953, a reported 72% households with televisions tuned into watch the I Love Lucy episode, Lucy Goes to the Hospital. It was one of those real life meets art things. Kind of. Lucy had given birth by cesarean section a few hours before the show aired. The show was actually shot two months earlier. I know if it happened today, it would be criticized for it obvious cynicism.

I’m deeply divided on the whole thing. On the one hand, social cohesion is important. It is good when a culture can share something positive like a fake birth on I Love Lucy. It seems the only time we are expected to come together now is when we go to war. On the other hand, it is really great that we can all enjoy the things that speak to us personally, without it having to be diluted to be widely appealing. According to Wikipedia “scripts for the episode were reviewed by a rabbi, a minister, and a priest in order to make sure it would not be offensive.” I love that they cared enough to not want to offend, but it seems excessive.

What’s strange to me, however, is that even with an endless range of entertainment choices, people still tend to gravitate toward the most vanilla “mass appeal” spectacles like American Idol. What’s with that? Are people by and large just that boring? I fear that they are. At the same time, I don’t want our cultural bonds to be based upon popular entertainment. This is why I think public education is important.

We should be bound together by our shared history — with absolute clarity of the good and the bad so that we don’t exclude anyone — most especially African Americans and native peoples. And we should be bound together by our responsibilities as citizens. There should be some notion of what it is to be a good citizen — and a bad one. But not only do we not have that, we don’t even have I Love Lucy — which was always a fragile reed to hang onto. But it was something.

ILoveLucyTitleScreen by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Ineffability of Success; Necessity of Humility

Posted on 18 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

I wrote before that I was listening to the This American Life episode, 20 Acts in 60 Minutes. And one of the stories was about a sausage manufacturer that had moved to a new high tech facility, but found that their premiere product was not the same. It still tasted as good, but it was the wrong color. They tried everything, but they couldn’t find the problem. Eventually, they learned that the problem was an idiosyncrasy of the old factory. They manage to recreate the idiosyncrasy and got their old sausage color back. Hooray.

Ezra Glass noted that he liked the story because it showed that we don’t usually know the source of our success. That really hit me. I’ve found that to be so true in life. In general, if you are involved in some venture, you need to do a whole lot of things that are probably pointless. But you just don’t know what is important and what isn’t. For example, here at Frankly Curious, I’ve written about 7,000 articles. but there are just a few that have gotten much traction. What’s more, they are generally articles I didn’t think much about. I’ve never gotten a lot of traction for an article that I thought very highly of while writing.

Where we get into trouble — as individuals and as communities — is in thinking that we are a success because we are good.

This is why I continue to work this blog. I really don’t know what I’m doing. What usually makes for a popular article is a single person finding what I wrote to be interesting. If that person has a hundred thousand people following them, it makes a big difference. And then we are into Horatio Alger territory where what really matters is impressing “important” people — this traditionally leading to a good job and marriage to one their nubile daughters. But this isn’t the way I want to think about it, and it isn’t the way I think about it. You can’t think about it that way.

I used to do IT for a real estate investment company. And the head of sales explained the process to me as follows. There was no such thing as a great sales person. There was just a certain percentage of people who are open to your pitch. So you pitch to as many people as you can. And that’s how you make sales. Obviously, there is a skill element to it. But in general, you get that skill by giving your pitch over and over again. And that’s how I look at writing.

Indeed, it is the skills that I learned writing excessively here that led to my day job. Five years ago, I was a decent enough writer. But I wasn’t able to grind out a thousand palatable words on any subject at all in under four hours. But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is the grinding itself. It’s the constant working that leads to success. But obviously, not a lot of success — at least, not necessarily. And that’s because success is ultimately about luck. To whatever extent that we succeed, it isn’t something that we really control. And it was never my intention to write a lot to get better; it was my intention to write a lot because I enjoyed it.

Where we get into trouble — as individuals and as communities — is in thinking that we are a success because we are good. Perhaps you saw this headline at The Hill, Trump Takes Credit for Iran Prisoner Release. Trump is, in an important way, the perfect president for this country. He also represents the absolute worst aspects of who we are.

We could all of us use a great deal more humility.

Image cropped from Silhouette Success on Beach by Missy Schmidt. Licensed via CC BY 2.0.

Specious Atheist Arguments Don’t Mean a Thing

Posted on 18 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

Born Again Atheist Elizabeth sent me to this very interesting Luke McKinney article at Cracked, 5 Atheist Arguments Which Aren’t Helping Anyone. It is written by my kind of atheist: one who seems constantly frustrated at the state of atheism today. Back in 1990, I started going to local atheist meetings in Portland. And they were filled with the most extreme group of oddballs you have ever seen. But look at atheism today: it is so much more “normal” and acceptable. So I think people now can be more delusional about it. They think the day when religion is gone is nigh. And they really do sound a lot like missionaries.

In the past, it was enough to know that Christians were silly and to find others who knew that too. But here’s a big thing, most arguments I got into in those days were extremely open-minded on my side. I would have loved for my Christian friends to have been able to convince me. Such cheap salvation! Just believe one silly thing and your life has meaning! Who wouldn’t want that to be true? Of course, on the other side of those arguments were always the most closed-minded of people. There was no way they were ever going to yield a point because they had discovered that One Weird Trick for endless ecstasy.

One of the most annoying things that Christians do is make really lame arguments. How do you know that heaven is real? It says right here in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” Oh, that explains everything. So I know that heaven exists because someone who thought heaven existed wrote it down in a book. This is the kind of closed-minded and closed-loop thinking that drives atheists crazy. And with good reason!

Today, there are far too many atheists whose thinking is every bit as closed-minded and closed-loop as the worst Christians. And a lot of atheist arguments are just a bag of tricks that they think just destroy Christianity or whatever other religion you want to talk about. The most annoying of these are the paradox arguments. I wrote about this before, No Contradiction in Genesis Eve Creation. My main point there was that paradoxes are found everywhere — even in deductive systems. And certainly the existence of the universe is a paradox, so why wouldn’t a creation story have paradoxes? (I then go on to show that there isn’t really a paradox to begin with.)

But the biggest problem with these kinds of trivial atheist arguments is that they really only address Biblical literalism: the most primitive kind of belief. And it isn’t just the smug Twitter atheists who do this. I’ve read atheist books by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and many others. And not one of them deals with religion as it is practiced by intelligent, thoughtful people. Now that’s fine! The vast majority of people do practice a kind of brainless fideism. But these same authors seem to think that their atheist arguments have wider currency. And they don’t.

What I hate in all things is hubris. (I hate it in myself most of all.) When Penn Jillette wrote his pathetic book God, No! his main argument is that we just don’t know and that we shouldn’t believe in things that we don’t know about. It’s a nice thought. But of course, Jillette is lying. Atheists are as certain of their worldviews as everyone else. And the vast majority of them have far more faith in science than they should have. They suffer from some a kind of literalist-like error regarding it, “Science says it; I believe it; that settles it.” Well, no. That’s the thing about science: nothing is ever settled.

Atheists have decided that they should have faith in science. And that’s good! Science is about the best thing we have going. But it doesn’t provide us with ultimate truth. There are limits to science. (If there are limits to logic, there are limits to science — see Kurt Gödel.) But with regard to the atheist debates, we are stuck with the fact that most religious people have just as much faith in science. Read Carl Sagan’s interview (pdf) with the Dalai Lama.

I complain so much about atheists because I expect better of them. When a Jehovah’s Witness comes to my door wanting to explain how we know that God loves me because John said so, I don’t much care because they are idiots. What I can’t tolerate is people thinking that just because they believe in science, they can make equally specious but atheist arguments.

Image cropped from ‘I’m a born-again atheist’ badge by Danny Birchall. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Morning Music: Happy Birthday

Posted on 18 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

Let us move on to the second album of The Birthday Party called, appropriately enough, The Birthday Party. And the song is “Happy Birthday.” It was a group composition when Nick Cave was starting to become the dominant songwriter (he never really did succeed in that regard). I love the song. Now you could listen carefully to the lyrics and come to the conclusion that it is a happy song. Many people think it is. But it’s not. When I was 17 years old, I wrote a song for a friend of mine’s high school graduation called, “Goodbye Graduate.” It was much more clear, with lines like, “You’ll get a wife and work for Dodge.” But “Happy Birthday” is about the same thing: aging and the fact that life just gets worse. Happy birthday!

One thing I find interesting is that Wikipedia refers to The Birthday Party as a “post-punk” band. How exactly is The Bithday Party post-punk? They sound very punk to me. But then Wikipedia insists upon calling every impressionist painter you’ve ever heard of as post-impressionist. Anyway, this song sounds like a lot of California punk from the late 1970s to me. But just remember, the boy in this song was eleven years old. That means he’s 47 years old now and his life sucks! Or he died of liver failure like one of the writers.

Tomorrow I might get to an actual Nick Cave song. In the mean time, enjoy this one:

Birthday Party album cover by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Bill O’Reilly Endorses Bernie Sanders!

Posted on 17 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

Bill O'Reilly Bill O’Reilly claims that he is going to move to Ireland if Bernie Sanders becomes president. He says that he is not willing to pay 90% income tax. This is strange because Sanders has said on numerous occasions that he will not raise income tax rates that high. At the 14 November 2015 Democratic debate, Sanders was asked how much he would raise the top marginal tax rate. He responded, “We haven’t come up with an exact number yet. But it will not be as high as the number under Dwight D Eisenhower which was 90%… I’m not a socialist compared to Eisenhower.”

So how is it that “I will not raise the income tax rate to 90%” becomes “I will raise the income tax rate to 90%”? Well, it comes from the man who I have come to think of as the heart and soul of the Republican Party: Donald Trump. Back in October, he was at a rally in Richmond, Virginia where he called Bernie Sanders a communist. And he said, “He’s gonna tax you people at 90 percent.” It must be true, it was on the television.

But television works both ways, and Politifact documented Sanders’ statements going back to 2008 where he has said that he wouldn’t go up to a 90% marginal tax rate. Based upon what I know of Bernie Sanders, I think he would like to go back to a top marginal tax rate that we had under that communist Richard Nixon (70%), but that he’d be thrilled just to get it back what it was under that pinko Ronald Reagan (50%).

There are several things to note about all this. As Martin Longman has pointed out, “Even if Sanders wanted that kind of tax reform, he’d never be able to accomplish it. He couldn’t accomplish it even if the Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.” Despite what idiot conservatives like to claim (but only when a Democrat is in the White House), we do not live under a dictatorship. What really matters in this case is that Sanders thinks that taxes on the rich are way too low, and this is a belief that even most Republicans share. Scary?! I don’t think so.

Part of the problem, of course, is that most people don’t understand marginal tax rates. I still hear urban legends about this guy who got a raise but ended up with less money because he got pushed into a higher tax bracket. Sorry folks, that ain’t the way our tax system works. (Note: this does happen to the poor, as I discussed before, Catch 22 for Poor in America.) But certainly Donald Trump understands marginal tax rates. But it’s like his bigotry: I don’t think he’s a racist; he’s a demagogue — which is far worse.

But at least Bill O’Reilly is being honest that Sander’s mythical 90% tax rate would affect him and not the nation as a whole. But I was really bothered by exactly what he said, “I’m not going to pay 90 percent of my income to that guy. I’m sorry. I’m not doing it.” This is typical of conservative thought and it is something that enrages me. Oh how conservatives like to talk about patriotism, but when it costs them one red penny, they are an island unto themselves.

If the top marginal tax rate went up to 90%, Bill O’Reilly would not be paying his taxes to “that guy.” He would not even be paying his taxes to the US government. He would be paying his taxes to the American people. He would be doing it because that is the price we pay for living in this country. It is the price that Bill O’Reilly pays for living in a country where he can make millions of dollars per year. If he had been born in Zimbabwe, he would have died poor and young of typhoid. Patriotism isn’t putting a yellow ribbon on your car and cheerleading every war that comes along. Bill O’Reilly is at best what Thomas Paine called a “sunshine patriot.” I would go further, I would call him a traitor.

But I think there are tens of millions of people in the US who would vote for Bernie Sanders for the single reason that Bill O’Reilly would go away. Sanders could not have received a better endorsement than this one. Unfortunately, O’Reilly is lying (as usual). He wouldn’t leave this country. To start with, he would have to renounce his US citizenship, or he would still have to pay the taxes. Once there, he would find that his income would plummet; he would no longer be making the $18 million from Fox News. And without that platform, his best selling books would become distinctly midlist. And as it is, his taxes would still be north of 50%.

Still, Bernie Sanders becoming president would really piss off Bill O’Reilly. And if I weren’t already a Sanders supporter, that would be enough to make me one.

Image licensed under fair use.