The Case for a Strong Federal Government

There's been a lot of discussion on states' rights, particularly in the Republican primaries. Their targets vary from time to time, but the EPA and minimum wage have both been mentioned.

Here's the problem: the United States is a free trade zone. That means California cannot place tariffs on goods imported from Michigan or Alabama, and vice versa.

If environmental protection becomes a state domain, then companies that do pollute will all move to the least-stringent state, and still sell their products all over the US. A company in a stricter state will generally not be able to compete. Minimum wage also works in a similar way, as low-wage states take jobs from high-wage states. In other words, it is a race to the bottom.

The United States is also a free travel zone, so Arizona cannot deny entry to a New Yorker, and so on, which means the issue of universal health care also requires a strong central government. If one state subsidizes health care while another one doesn't, then sick people will go to the state with cheap health care, unfairly raising costs for everybody there. Just require the sick person to establish residency, I hear you suggest. The problem is that this shuts the door on people who move legitimately, but happen to be sick. In other words, each state must continue to provide whatever benefits it provides to citizens who depart for another state, at least for the duration of the residency period at the new state, or you'll have a (perhaps intolerable) gap in coverage. This is clearly a horribly messy situation that a nationwide coverage system can mitigate.

But you're free not to buy goods from polluting low-wage states, you say. The free market will take care of it, you say. How's that working for Chinese goods? Besides, the market is only a solution after the damage is done, and with things like carcinogens evident only after decades of exposure, punishing the polluters in the market is cold comfort. Worse, how would you like to travel halfway around the country to sue a polluter, while dealing with cancer?

Put simply, things that don't naturally obey borders require a central government. Pollution is not a state issue, because water flows from state to state, and the air is blown from state to state. Wages and other manufacturing costs are not a state issue, because we are all required to accept your products into our state. Communicable diseases. War. Long-Distance Transportation. Wild Habitat Conservation.

The US Federal Government may indeed be bloated, I'll freely grant. But unless you want to end free trade and movement among states, think twice about gutting the parts that require putting national interest above those of one or two states.

Wanderlust

I left Taiwan at age seven, and lived in the Philippines until I was 22, when I moved to the US. I lived in three different places in Taipei, three in the Philippines, two in Maryland, and two in California. So I think the longest I've ever stayed in one place is the eight or nine years in Mandaluyong, and the eight or nine here in Fremont.

Over the past few years, we thought it was probably time to buy a house, and started to save up for it. But on this previous vacation, an urge that had brewed for a couple of days came rushing out while we cooled our heels outside the Tate Modern museum in London, watching the Thames and fighting jetlag. An urge to leave it all behind and start over somewhere different.

I've always liked vacations for their time-warping quality. I feel like the whole world continues to move along its path while I've detached in observation, as if I've become timeless during those few days. This one was a bit different, and is probably mixed in with some mid-life crisis of sorts. I've long thought that aging was best represented as a narrowing of options, in the sense that as a child you could be almost anything, but as you go to college, graduate, and move from job to job, your path becomes more and more defined over the years. At some point, you are basically the one thing that you are, until the end. So this might really be an urge to fight nature, to create paths that are as wide as they were when I was young. A way to put off stagnation, decay, and therefore death?

I'm actually pretty happy with where I am, and I'm probably too responsible to actually do anything about it, yet the wanderlust tickles.

High

I'm tired of hearing Republicans complain about taxes being too high. What exactly is the magical percentage at which it isn't too high? Rick Perry wants 20%, Herman Cain is infatuated with 9%, but why not 8% or 2% or none at all?

I get the feeling that the Republican voter pictures the government as a Scrooge McDuck of sorts, hoarding all that tax money into a giant safe. In reality, every dollar collected is spent, in fact on top of taxes we borrow some more dollars to spend. Thus, taxes are not too high, they are by definition too low because we are incurring more debt every year. They might be spent on things you don't like, which is what we should be talking about instead.

Now, in many ways, government spending actually saves you money. If we each have to buy guns to defend our homes, it'll probably cost more than setting up a good police department, and probably won't even work that well (remember the wild west? really want to live like that?). Ditto for fire protection and various public works like roads, pipes, and bridges. Just imagine if your only way to get to work involves driving on a private road: how much do you suppose the owner's going to charge?

Other kinds of expenditures have a more indirect effect. The strong (and very costly) US military ensures the free flow of petroleum to fuel our economy. They deter foreign invasion, which provides a predictably safe environment for businesses to invest. All of that is worth money, but how much, exactly? If we cut the defense budget by a billion, what would it cost us indirectly? What about ten billion or a hundred billion? The same analysis can and should be done against each of the big expenditures.

In other words, there is no magic percentage to taxes or spending, and "too high" can only be true if you calculate it relative to what you're getting back. So let's talk about what government programs aren't worth the money instead.

Percentages

Percentages are making waves these days.

There's the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is upset that 1% of the country controls so much of our resources. There's the backlash, the 53% who are upset that 47% pay no taxes (federal income taxes, to be precise). There's Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan, which are three different percentages in one!

But there are plenty of truths hidden by these numbers. The top 1.5%, which is about 1.7 million households, make over US$250,000 a year. But not all of them are lazy fat cats sucking on our economic blood. Especially at the lower end of that scale, there are people who do real and relevant work. Similarly, 47% of Americans are not just lazy welfare queens who overextended their credit and are hoping for government to bail them out. Many of them work very hard and many of them wish they had work. The 9% national sales tax also hides a truth. Adding even 1% tax to the poor in this economy is a tremendous hardship. The truth is, once you reach a certain level of comfort, the percentages don't mean nearly as much anymore. If I have to pay thousands more in taxes, I might forego a vacation, perhaps delay buying a house, perhaps buy a cheaper car, none of which seriously affect my way of life. The truth is that I "lose" more than thousands just selling my Apple stock at the "wrong" time.

Are some things so egregious that they disgust me? Absolutely. My capital makes gains literally without me doing anything, and realizing those gains into cash requires a few mouse clicks. Why should those gains be taxed at a lower rate than salary? Yet, should we tax doctors and lawyers and owners of small businesses a lot?

Does it make sense that some people would have less money if they actually found a job? Absolutely, we should fix that nonsense, so we're not paying people to stay home. Are a few having too many children just to collect aid money? Sure, let's fix that.

But the very definition of "poor" is that you don't have enough money for what you need. Taking money from them either in the form of new taxes or decreased benefits means that they have to lose something else that they need. Since unemployment is already at 9%, they're not likely at all to find good jobs, even if you think taxing them would encourage them to seek jobs. So they fall further into poverty, credit, and perhaps even crime.

So look beyond just numbers. There are real people behind them that defy such simple categorization. Saying that it's 99% versus 1% or 53% versus 47% implies that there are only two kinds of people among 300 million Americans, which is just wrong.

Absolutely

Here's the thing, conservatives: let's say we take US$1 more in taxes per year from every millionaire in the country. Do you honestly think they would change their job-creatin' investments in any way whatsoever? Surely not, since even middle-class people would not really complain (or even notice) losing a dollar a year. Some of us lose more than that just miscalculating a tip for a waitress, or just forget to take it out of our pants before washing.

Guess what? There are actually ten million millionaires in the US, and we've just cut the deficit by US$10 million. You care about the deficit, right? If so, you should be intrigued by my idea of reducing the deficit with no pain whatsoever.

Now, the other extreme is obviously bad. If we took most of what rich people earn, indeed they'll find some way to avoid it, perhaps by moving elsewhere. But surely there's some small amount that we could increase their taxes to help reduce the deficit, without them even really noticing? We can reduce the deficit by a billion dollars by taxing each millionaire a mere US$100 more. That's a bit over US$8 a month, not even three fancy coffees. Do you really think that would stop them from "creating jobs"?

The opposite in the political spectrum is true: if we paid a dollar less per recipient of Social Security, we'd save a good chunk of money (about US$60 million). If we cut too much, they'll be endangered.

Now, you might say that a billion here or there isn't a lot of money, compared to the trillions in debt. That's right, and the debt needs to be addressed by big (and probably painful) solutions, but why not cut a billion here or there anyway?

So let's stop saying that taxes absolutely cannot be raised, and benefits absolutely cannot be reduced, and instead find a balance that shares the burden like a united country should.

Dumberest

Close on the heels of my earlier post about conservatives who refuse to think more than a little, here are some recent examples of mind-numbingly simple logical errors they make.

As Dahlia Lithwick points out in her Slate article, conservatives believe that government can't do anything right. Not health care, not social safety nets, not protecting the environment. She also points out that despite all that, they believe that government can administer the death penalty just fine. Governor Perry of Texas claims to have never lost any sleep over the executions of 234 people. Whether or not any of them have been wrongly put to death is one thing, the more and immediately obvious problem is the total lack of doubt. How can the government be so inevitably bureaucratic and inefficient, yet make no mistakes on death penalty cases?

The other exception that she didn't write about is Defense. Somehow there isn't even a penny that should be cut from the over six hundred billion dollars spent on Defense. How can it be that the Pentagon runs with perfect efficiency, while no other department can run with even just an acceptable level of inefficiency?

If you think that's bad, their blind faith in tax cuts goes all the way into lunacy. The actual cost of the Bush tax cuts is not easy to calculate accurately, but suffice to say we're talking trillion. The tax cuts took effect in 2001, and completely failed to prevent the economic meltdown in 2009. The US$787-billion stimulus that conservatives called a failure? About a third of that was in tax cuts, so if the stimulus was a total failure, clearly tax cuts are a big part of that failure. More than a trillion in tax cuts failed to prevent the meltdown, and another US$218B in tax cuts "failed" to revive the economy. The latest round of tax cuts from the inane debt limit deal? Well, the first thing it failed to prevent was the downgrade of the US credit rating. When exactly are these tax cuts supposed to do anything?

You think corporations need cash? Apple Inc. alone is sitting on over US$76 billion in cash (or cash equivalents). If it's not spending that money, why would giving Apple another few more billion dollars change anything? If you understand anything at all about how banks work, you'll understand that the reason your savings account pays about 1% right now is because they have plenty of deposits compared to loans. There's plenty of money ready to be invested, if only there was something worthwhile to invest in.

The same Governor Perry also said that the verdict is still out on human causes of climate change. Ignoring the broad consensus among scientists for a moment, Perry's stance is foolish. Government leaders must act on incomplete information all the time. If he had some information the day before that terrorists were planning to hijack planes on 9/11, is he going to take no action until he gets complete and irrefutable intelligence on which buildings they plan to crash into? Of course not, he should do what he can with the best available information. Remember this is also a person who wants to dramatically cut social security now, even though it can probably still pay out 75% of benefits until 2085. Why is that verdict somehow "in"?

But Michele Bachmann takes this to her own level. She actually retold the story of a girl apparently suffered mental retardation after receiving a vaccine. Even the most cursory understanding of science should tell you that an anecdote has no meaning, because just because one happened after another does not mean there's any relationship between the two events. (In fact, it's quite hard to conclusively prove that one thing caused another.) Yet this woman - who has some non-zero chance of becoming president - believes this anecdote told by some random person she doesn't even know. She is completely unqualified for any position requiring judgement, because she has no way of telling what is reliable information and what isn't.

So, no, while I'm not at all pleased with many of his policies, President Obama doesn't really have to worry about losing my vote.

Dumb and Dumber

Two companies notorious for their lack of direction want to get together. They are not without talent. During my short stint at Yahoo! I gained respect for the mundane task of serving bytes, because when you have six hundred million customers, even the easy is hard. I've been a client-side developer for much of my career, and we scaled by selling more units of phones or iPods or whatever. The server side of things is complex, and people who can do it well (by virtue of you not hearing of disasters) are not to be sneered at. Apple has been a juggernaut this decade in seemingly all things, but many of its few failures have involved building servers.

Saving Yahoo! and AOL is actually simple: Decide a direction, brutally remove everything that doesn't fit along that direction, and concentrate your remaining resources on being the best at it. That is, simple to say, not simple to do.