There's a lot of talk about change in the air these days, and whether you think it will come from Barack Obama's eloquence and diplomacy, John McCain's influence and experience, or nothing will change at all, you will have to look long and hard to find someone with no problems at all with how the federal government is currently run. In the interest of furthering the art of armchair politics, I offer a rambling rebuttal to just a few things I have witnessed this year.
Taxes are a real drag. Nobody enjoys paying them, and of course, the only direct benefit you derive from them is a refund cheque that comes every year (right?), so it's easy to write them off as needlessly complicated bureaucratic excess—hence the popularity of alternate tax schemes. The one that has had the most attention this year, thanks to Ron Paul's refreshingly quaint campaign for the GOP nomination, is called Fair Tax.
The most often overlooked (or glossed over?) problem with the Fair Tax scheme is that it would effectively be a regressive income tax, rather than the current progressive income tax we have. It is simply a fact that the wealthy spend a smaller percentage of their total incomes than a normal family, or a family in poverty1. The only response I've had to this is to set up a progressive system of deductions and exemptions to reimburse poorer families for this tax at the end of every month... which sounds even more complicated than the current system.
There is always the possibility that benevolent corporations, freed from the oppression of the anachronistic and Machiavellian Internal Revenue Service, will take this regressive taxation into account and take pity on their largest group of customers and reduce the base price of products. Unfortunately, businesses seem to have forgotten the concept of externalities after a heavy cocaine binge in the 1980s, and trickle-down economics will most likely work its magic in an exciting new way, thanks to reduced taxation and government services. I shall leave the impact of this last phenomenon as an exercise for the reader.
No amount of fair taxing, no matter how regressive or progressive, will ever be as simple as it sounds, nor be any more complete than traditional income tax. One very lucrative example that comes to mind is the illegal drug trade. How can you collect a sales tax on a product that is illegal to sell or buy?
The true issue here is, of course, the fact that illegal drugs are entering the country in the first place. The war on drugs has created an environment conducive to organised crime, just like the effect Prohibition had on mob activity. The same smugglers that ship millions of dollars worth of cocaine and heroin into American ports and through the borders could just as easily smuggle humans, national secrets, or munitions.
The drugs that are coming into the country, despite the best efforts of the DEA, and even drugs produced in the country, are absolutely unsafe. Not because of the inherent potential for drugs to cause physical harm— there are a million legal and more effective ways to harm yourself—but because their production is absolutely unregulated and consumers rarely have the expertise or resources to know if they are indeed buying a legitimate drug, or if they are buying product laced with toxic cutting agents. The free market will obviously favour legitimate drugs, but the danger of smuggling leaves little room for alternate suppliers.
Consider for a moment the implications of decriminalised drugs. With reduced risk, the possibility of more structured markets and even regulations concerning contaminants, coupled with a more sensible drug education and support policy, it's conceivable that drug abuse rates will decline along with organised crime. From a civil libertarian standpoint, legislation barring adults, grown people with the right to decide for themselves on a myriad of other issues, is morally wrong.
There is, of course, no monopoly on being wrong by any metric, but the most egregious moral fracases come from our very own executive branch, 2000-2009. I could wax turbulently about the crimes committed on every level of the Bush administration, but it would simply be trite. The too-close difference in Democratic and Republican members of Congress simply results in endless filibuster sessions, empty threats, and wasteful concessions, instead of actual lawmaking; there simply aren't any more resources with which to reign in the flamboyant executive branch. What we have now is a most elegant failure of our well-designed, but perhaps naïve, constitution, and because it is in the best interests of the ruling bodies to leave it in its current state, there will likely be no progress there in the near future.
And if there is to be no reform of the underlying function of the Executive and Legislative branches, what of the Judiciary? Perhaps I am short-sighted, and I may regret these words if another Justice dies while a Republican is president, but the Supreme Court is performing its function as it should. "Legislating from the bench" is an interesting, if not strictly constitutional, way of mending some of the problems with Congress; without that pesky tradition, there would be no Roe v. Wade, Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board of Education, or Lawrence v. Texas.
It must be said that our government, our economy, and our lives are more complicated than the writers of the Constitution could have ever predicted in their lives. Institutions have sprung up and grown in strange directions out of necessity and political expediency, and now our world is growing ever smaller. Instant communication and rapid travel forces our hand: we must acknowledge that we are a part of a larger global economy, that culture will change as it always has, in unfamiliar directions. The notions that we can suddenly switch to a gold standard for our currency, or turn away millions of immigrants, or ignore the climate are just as anachronistic as imagining a populated moon. Our world is changing, and we may not like where it is going, but we can't get off now.
- There are many sources that agree, but http://www.bls.gov/opub/ils/pdf/opbils26.pdf has easy to understand tables.