The Wealthy have a Great Idea: Progressive Taxation!

According to the Wall Street Journal,

A new argument is emerging among the pro-globalization crowd in the U.S., the folks who see continued globalization and trade as vital to the country's prosperity: Tax the rich more heavily to thwart an economically crippling political backlash against trade prompted by workers who see themselves -- with some justification -- as losers from globalization.

How . . . innovative. No wonder those guys make so much money. But here's the interesting part:

The sharpest articulation of this view comes not from one of the Democratic presidential campaigns, but from economist Matthew Slaughter, who recently left President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers to return to Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.

Welcome aboard, d0rks.

More keen insight:

"Individuals are asking themselves, 'Is globalization good for me?' and in a growing number of cases, arriving at the conclusion that it is not," Messrs. Slaughter and Scheve write. (You can see why Mr. Slaughter waited until he had left the Bush administration to speak his mind.) [Not that Bush doesn't encourage his staff to speak their minds.]

The conventional response from fans of globalization, including the Bush administration, is rhetorical support for more aid for workers hurt by imports to salve the immediate pain and better education to equip the next generation of Americans with skills needed to command high wages in a global economy. Both are crucial. Progress on both is painfully inadequate.

But trade-adjustment assistance is traditionally targeted narrowly at workers hurt by imports. Today's angst about globalization is far more pervasive. Whatever the actual impact of offshore outsourcing today, it has millions of white-collar workers frightened. And education takes generations to pay off.

What to do? To preserve political support for the globalization dividend, spread the benefits more broadly by taxing winners more and losers less.

"It is best not to address increasingly salient concerns about inequality by interfering with trade," Mr. Summers argued at a forum sponsored by the Hamilton Project, the think tank he and others founded to provide intellectual fodder for like-minded politicians. His solution: use progressive taxation to offset some, but not all, of the increase in inequality. For starters, return tax rates for couples with incomes above $200,000 to the levels they were under President Clinton. [ . . . ]

This, obviously, would be a sea change in fiscal policy. Mr. Clinton raised taxes, especially at the top, to bring down the deficit. Mr. Bush cut taxes, especially on the top. But all this talk is likely to influence any Democrat who takes the White House in 2008. He or she will almost surely move to raise taxes on the best-off Americans -- both to raise revenue to pay the bills and to resist the three-decade-old inequality trend.

Um. Am I misreading this, or did a WSJ writer just recommend Clinton's taxation policies? And imply that the current situation is a result of Bush's tax cuts? Are the wealthy finally recognizing that it is in their interest not to be total fuckers?

technorati tags: Globalization Lawrence Summers Economic Justice Progressive Taxation

The Atheist Imagination/Imaginary

[Originally extended February 19, 2006 at the old BrainMortgage offices.]

Rereading Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity* for my ethics seminar, I came across a pithy articulation of the nature of cultural change:

What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument for cultural change.(7)

Now, we could take this and apply it to any number of ways liberals and leftists consistently employ vocabularies of disdain and denigration with respect to conservatives, particularly the lower class they so often see themselves as fighting for. But I want to think more specifically about religious belief and its place in the world, theism being one of those things about which many leftists and liberals are particularly disdainful, even vitriolic. They can no more understand religionists' belief in God or rejection of evolution than they can comprehend lower-class conservatives voting for W.

The problem with atheism is not that it's wrong as a religious position, but rather that it suffers from a two-fold failure of imagination. First, there seems to be (and I admit I am generalizing) a tendency among atheists to understand science as "disproving" the existence of a creator God, particularly as that God is represented in the Bible. Unfortunately, this simply reinforces religionist understandings of science by participating in a reading of creation narratives as history or science (which they are not). Evolution only "refutes" the creation account in the Bible if we think they are telling us the same story; of course, that is also the only context in which the Biblical creation account might be understood to "refute" evolution. Better to jettison the literalist/historico-scientific hermeneutic altogether and argue what is much more plausible and more compelling, namely that Biblical creation narratives try to tell us something about how meaning arises in the world, rather than making factual claims (whether we see them as true or false) about the history of the cosmos.

The second failure of imagination within atheism is that atheists haven't found ways of talking about living in the world that are more compelling (more useful to people, more aesthetically pleasing, etc.) than religious ways of talking about living in the world. Should we be surprised, then, that religious people don't adopt an atheist vocabulary? Maybe part of the problem is the naturalist bent of so many atheists: however creative they might be in their scientific or philosophical work (and many of them are . . . although many are surely not), they see atheism precisely as a logical problem instead of as a language game, and religious belief as simply the result of ignorance or misunderstanding, rather than as a failure of atheism to bring anything useful to the table.

The problem arises, it seems to me, when atheists (or theists) are absolutists about the veracity of their language game as opposed to any other, instead of seeing that language game as a means toward the end of a better world. Such people are perhaps more in service of "the Truth" than of justice or equity or even happiness, which seem secondary considerations at best. Maybe that is a good definition of religion?

Of course, this also shows us how the atheist who takes atheism as programmatic actually agrees with the theist/religionist who takes his or her religion programmatically. Both argue that the Truth is out there; they also agree on the kind of truth it is. They disagree only on the means of attaining it. When it comes to a just world, both will say that the (only) foundation for a better, more just, happier world is the Truth, which is only available to us from the perspective of my religious position. Only when we admit that no/my God rules the cosmos will it be possible for humanity to achieve its highest state.

Personally, I don't see the need to impose a vocabulary of atheism before or as part of promoting a vocabulary of justice. To see a discourse of justice as possibly only within a discourse of theism or, conversely, within a discourse of atheism, is to construct a language game that narrows rather than expands the idea of justice, which seems precisely contradictory to the vocabulary of justice itself.

That said, many if not most theists need to adopt more coherent religious vocabularies; specifically, they need to stop talking religion like it's science.



*Love that serial comma.

tags technorati : Rorty, Religion, Philosophy, Atheism, Science

Rorty on the Holy

Richard Rorty, arguably the greatest of all American philosophers, has died of pancreatic cancer . . . which also killed Jacques Derrida (and, coincidentally, my father; huh). I suppose I ought to write something substantive about Rorty's philosophical project or his impact on my own thinking, but anyone who reads what I post here about science, religion, and ethics will already have seen it. And others are doing a fine job of posting such personal witness. Habermas has this to say, concluding thus:

Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

The Strange Career of the Blair Government

Ross McKibbin has written an astute summation of Blair and New Labour for the latest London Review of Books. For both British and American readers the article should provoke somber reflection on the states of their respective countries: Blair's cynical compromises and missed opportunies will remind Americans of nothing so much as the DLC and the failed promise of the Clinton Presidency.

Unfortunately, I doubt Labour or Democratic politicians will learn any of the lessons offered by the results of their party's makeovers.

Haggard Not Gay! At All!

What bullshit.

What I really want to know is what "completely heterosexual" actually means.

Israel Is Blowback Central

I think we got the idea to set up the Mujahideen from Mossad, or something. Way too "clever by half" to be our own idea.

Uri Avnery notes in the Guardian,

Just before he died last month, Uri Dan, Ariel Sharon's loyal mouthpiece for almost 50 years, published a book in France. It includes a report of a conversation Sharon told him about, with President Bush. Sharon asked for permission to kill Arafat and Bush gave it to him, with the proviso that it must be done undetectably. When Dan asked Sharon whether it had been carried out, Sharon answered: "It's better not to talk about that." Dan took this as confirmation. [ . . . ]

Is there proof Arafat was murdered by Israeli or other agents? No, there is none. This week I again ran into Zahalka, and both of us concluded that the suspicion is growing stronger, together with the conviction that Arafat's absence is felt now more than ever.

Is it conspiracy theory to suspect that Mossad (or I suppose some other agency) assassinated Arafat? Hardly. Proof, no. Plausible suspicion, definitely. This is partly because Israel clearly does not recognize elected Palestinian leaders as heads of state, and they are therefore subject to what is euphemistically termed "targeted removal" (or something like that). Moreover, Israel has a history of creating problems for themselves and of exacerbating existing problems. Israel supported the founding of Hamas in the first place in a classic "too clever by half" effort to provide a religious counter to the PLO. Oops.

Avnery concludes:

And, of course, if Arafat were alive, everything would be much easier.

I detect a faint whiff of sarcasm, but in the context of the rest of the article, I think he's serious. And I don't know if I agree. It seems rather to me that with Arafat gone, it's easy to forget the corruption and the diva syndrome. Well, and the refusal of Israel to deal with him, either.

On the other hand, wouldn't it be just like Israel to kill the one guy who might be able to get the kind of Pan-Arab/Pan-Muslim consensus that would make a peace process actually work?

Will the Real Activist Judges Please Stand Up?

[Originally extended July 6, 2005 at the old Brainmortgage offices.]

The New York Times (only the world's sixth-rated newspaper, thank you. Mazel tov to the FT.) has an op-ed from Paul Gewirtz on so-called judicial activism.

We found that justices vary widely in their inclination to strike down Congressional laws. Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was the most inclined, voting to invalidate 65.63 percent of those laws; Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, was the least, voting to invalidate 28.13 percent. The tally for all the justices appears below.

Thomas 65.63 % Kennedy 64.06 % Scalia 56.25 % Rehnquist 46.88 % O'Connor 46.77 % Souter 42.19 % Stevens 39.34 % Ginsburg 39.06 % Breyer 28.13 %

One conclusion our data suggests is that those justices often considered more "liberal" - Justices Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens - vote least frequently to overturn Congressional statutes, while those often labeled "conservative" vote more frequently to do so. At least by this measure (others are possible, of course), the latter group is the most activist.

This seems like a pretty good definition. Gewirtz goes on to point out that, by this measure, activism per se is not a bad thing. That depends on the constitutionality of the laws they are striking down.

What if we took "activism" to mean the expansion (or contraction?) of rights? That is, to rule in such a way as to either expand or contract the rights of citizens is to be an "activist" judge. Who would be the activists, then, and in what direction?



Thanks to Dave for this one.