Recently, various Democratic politicians have been pushing a range of tax options.  From what I can determine, and from what many experts are saying, most of them would cause more harm than good.  I’m not saying that we don’t need more federal revenue.  I’m saying that everyone is looking in the wrong places.

Let’s go back to basics.  First, you can’t tax people who have no income.  Second, despite the political rhetoric, it’s highly unlikely that a “wealth tax” is constitutional.  Third, a wealth tax would destroy a lot of entrepreneurs while only marginally inconveniencing financial types.  That’s because the wealth of the entrepreneurs is usually tied up in stock and having to sell large blocks of it to pay taxes could destroy the company or at least damage it.  The same thing could happen to family held companies without large cash reserves.  Fourth, extremely high marginal tax rates would cause either creative tax evasion or tax flight, both of which would leave the upper middle class shouldering the burden, not the wealthy.

BUT… there is another source of untapped revenue that has several advantages.  First, it targets the financial community, and that’s where most of the money is.  Second, it’s about time that Wall Street starting paying the bill.  And third, it’s not really that onerous a tax when you think about it.  And fourth, some states already use it.

I’m talking about a transfer tax on every share of stock sold on every stock exchange in the U.S.  The tax would be levied on the seller, since the seller gets the money. With computers, keeping track shouldn’t be that hard.

I did some back of the envelope calculations, which astounded me. The other day, which wasn’t extraordinary, the top 100 stocks on the NASDAQ-100 had a daily volume of over 400 million shares traded.  Only one of those stocks sold for less than $6 a share and the rest looked to average a hundred dollars a share.  The yearly sales value of just those 100 stocks look to exceed $10 trillion annually.  A one percent transfer tax on the sales of the shares of just those one hundred companies would yield about $100 billion annually… and there are over 4000 publicly traded companies on U.S.

Now I know that there are also some public start-up companies whose shares are valued in cents, and some sort of sliding scale would be necessary for them, but given how much Wall Street has benefitted, is a one percent a share, or even half of that, too much to ask of the large established firms… and the algorithm-driven trading computers used by market profiteers?

Everyone’s heard about the “Golden Rule,” but there’s a variation on it that I often heard from the boss of the consulting firm I worked for years ago in Washington, D.C. – “Those who’ve got the gold make the rules.”

Along those same lines, the sixteen century poet Sir John Harrington wrote, “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”  That quote was co-opted and often cited by the far right in the 1960s as the result of a book with a title of  None Dare Call It Treason, but unfortunately the principle still applies today, except in a far different context, as a result of the “second” golden rule, except it might be entitled Law by and for Affluent White Males.

By that, I mean that whether something is a crime or not, legally speaking, depends on what the law says, and the laws in the United States have been drafted, almost entirely, by affluent white men, except, to some degree as one reader pointed out, recently in California.  Now, it’s definitely a crime if someone takes a gun and steals your wallet.  Likewise, it’s a crime if someone physically assaults you for no reason, or if someone hacks your bank account and drains it.

But what about laws and a legal system that affect poorer people more than richer ones?  Or ones that use laws to transfer money from poorer people to richer ones?

It’s a crime for two parties to collude to force people to pay more for a product, unless one of those parties is a pharmaceutical company and the other is the Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid Administration, because the government, thanks to a special law passed some fifteen years ago, is expressly forbidden from negotiating lower drug prices.  In effect, it’s a form of price-fixing, and it’s taking money from the pockets of every health care consumer and putting it in the bank accounts of all the pharmaceutical companies… and adding to executive and CEO bonuses.  Those higher costs pose a far higher burden on the poor and elderly than on the rich and famous. Right now, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of diabetics are having trouble paying for insulin because the pharmaceutical industry keeps jiggering the formulations so that a basic medication more than fifty years old can cost diabetics almost $6,000 a year, up from $2,800 seven years ago. The cost of one Advair asthma inhaler has gone from $316 in 2013 to $541 this month.

Robbery and embezzlement are both forms of theft.  Most robberies are committed by poorer members of society, and most embezzlement by those better off.  According to Federal sentencing reports in 2016, the average sentence time for embezzlement was eight months, but half of those convicted were sentenced to no time in jail; the average sentence for robbery was six years. By comparison, another study showed that the average sentence for fraud of less than $5,000 was five months, while the average sentence for greater amounts averaged twenty-two months, but burglary/breaking and entering, which also doesn’t involve violence to others, has an average sentence of 4.6 years.

So, the poor and disadvantaged criminals steal less money and spend more time in jail.  Part of that is, of course, that more affluent clients can also afford better attorneys.  Now, if that embezzlement actually hits the rich and famous, as in the case of Bernie Madoff, then the gloves come off.  That’s why Madoff is facing 150 years in prison. 

But my former boss’s “Golden Rule” also affects how new laws are made as well.

For example, recently the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell didn’t break corruption laws when he pulled political favors for a big donor in return for lavish gifts and personal loans. That kind of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” behavior was not barred by current corruption laws, the Court decided, despite the tens of thousands of dollars McDonnell and his wife received in gifts, cash, and loans.  This decision was the result of small changes in the laws over the years that now allow corporations and the rich to literally buy politicians legally, as also reflected in the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

And conservatives wonder why minorities are often skeptical of the laws and the legal system?

I’ve often said that I live in the semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret, and in the last month or so, the state legislature has decided to prove that.  As background, voters in the state voted two initiatives into law.  One legalized various uses of marijuana for medical purposes; the other expanded Medicaid coverage as allowed under federal law.

The medical marijuana initiative was largely supported because, for the last two sessions of the legislature, the legislature voted against all measures to do so, and many felt that was because of the views of the LDS Church.

Why might people suppose that?  It just might be because the Republicans have a super-majority in both the state house and senate, and, interesting enough, 81 of the 82 Republicans are members of the LDS faith, even though only about 63% of the state population is LDS.  The Democrats, all 22 of them, are, as best I can determine, roughly 60% LDS and 40% other faiths, which is, also interestingly enough, close to the belief structure of the state. 

Once the marijuana initiative passed, immediately after the election, the Republicans called a special session, declaring that, as law, the initiative was unsuitable, and immediately went to work to pass legislation to water it down and eliminate certain provisions.  They were successful in doing so, not surprisingly when you consider their faith and majority status.

The second initiative was to expand Medicaid coverage to the additional level allowed, but not required, by federal law. Now that the legislature has convened, the state Senate has passed and sent to the state House legislation to significantly cut back that coverage on the grounds that, some five years from now, it will cost the state some $10 million dollars a year to maintain that coverage.  But the point of the initiative was to cover all of those eligible but not covered, not part of them, and the cost not already in the state budget to the average taxpayer would have been less than $10 per year.

The House speaker has indicated that the measure will pass, and the governor will sign it, and all the Republicans claim that it’s necessary for budgetary prudence, even though the state is running a budgetary surplus, and the legislature is mulling tax cuts… and, oh, yes, the state spends less per student on public education than any state in the union, by a wide margin.

But then, perhaps all this might, just might, have something to do with the fact that the LDS Church insists on a 10% tithe on gross income, and it doesn’t want its members overtaxed.

But… all this might also provide an example of why I’m just a bit leery when people trumpet “states’ rights.”

In The Outline of History (1920), H.G. Wells stated, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”  True as that may be or may have been, I’m getting the feeling that at present we’re seeing a race between “image” and reality.

Regardless of rhetoric and belief, walls seldom work at keeping people in or out, and when they do work, it takes enormous effort and creates horrible tragedies… and in a short time, any wall fails.  History has shown this time and again.  That’s reality, but for the past month we’ve seen a political battle between the image of the wall as a security blanket and the reality of its impracticality.

Study after study has shown that societies work far better, are more stable, and progress more when economic inequality is lessened in a society, particularly the gap between the poorest and the very richest members of a society.  History has also shown that absolute income leveling does not work, and that functional societies need income gradients based on ability and effort.  Yet we have a world where the 26 richest men in the world [and they’re all men] control as much wealth as the poorest 48% (or 3.7 billion people), and even in the United States, the top one percent controls 40% of all the wealth, and it’s become harder and harder for people to move up from the income level of their parents, or, if they’re born rich, easier to stay rich than at any time in over a century, essentially since the time of the Robber Barons.  Yet all too many Americans hold to the image that government hinders income mobility, when in fact government law and policies over the last thirty years have largely benefited the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.  That’s the sad reality.

Then there’s the image of social media “bringing people together,” but if social media actually does that, then why do people feel more isolated than ever, and why are those individuals most addicted to social media the ones who feel the most isolated.  Once again, the image seems to be triumphing over reality.

Even as Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are melting faster and faster, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, too many people hold to the image that the world is too vast for “mere” human activity to play any significant part in the ongoing global warming. And deniers cite a mere handful of scientists who deny global warming over the 99% who cite human activities as a significant cause. 

The United States is a far safer place for children than it’s ever been, yet American parents are more fearful for their children’s safety than ever before, largely because the media focuses on every sensational adverse event that happens to a child. In the same vein, millions of parents don’t have their children vaccinated, even when years of statistics show that the side-effects of vaccination are minuscule compared to the side-effects of the illnesses those vaccines prevent.  These parents either don’t know or ignore the fact that measles and whooping cough used to kill thousands of children annually, or that measles largely wiped out several Native American tribes and a huge percentage of Hawaiian islanders.

We have a President who has made thousands of false statements over the past two years, and yet something like 38% of the people still believe him.

So why do images grasp so many of us so firmly that we cannot see reality?

These days, there’s a lot of talk about the polarization of political views, which is reflected in the current stand-off between the Republican Senate/President Trump and the House Democratic leadership.  As always, however, what occurs in Washington is a reflection of what’s happening everywhere in the nation.

One of the facets of this polarization is, from what I’ve observed, a much greater tendency for each side to objectify the other side by insisting that anyone who doesn’t agree fully with them on various “hot-button” issues must be a card-carrying extremist on the other side.

So… if I say that the ultra-feminists are carrying political correctness to absurd extremes, which I believe they are (since I believe that they should have concentrated on getting economic and political power and equality first and foremost), I risk being called a toxic male, or at best one who is hopelessly out of touch. If I say that black movements such as Black Lives Matter have not only called attention to young blacks unjustly killed, which has happened far too often, but also gone overboard and exalted black street punks/minor criminals into martyrs, which they have, then I’m told that I have no understanding of minority rights and am a white privileged racist.

If I point out to my rancher/farmer acquaintances that they can’t keep mining the groundwater in the high desert area where we live or that there’s too much overgrazing on federal lands, I’m immediately dismissed as a left-wing environmentalist who doesn’t understand and wants to destroy their family heritage. Likewise, if I point out that the BLM has mismanaged the handling of a host of issues, from wild horses to collecting grazing fees, I’m called part of the right-wing rape-the-land advocates.

If I point out that the majority of “hate” groups in the U.S.  are by far mostly composed of far right extremists, which is documented, and if I don’t publicly condemn the comparatively few extreme leftist outbreaks, which I tend not to do because the far-right is doing that quite extensively, and I really don’t want to associate myself with them on that, then I’m labelled as an extreme leftist.

If I point out that the current administration’s idea of building a wall is insane, impractical, and wasteful, then I’m a far left liberal who wants to turn the country over to greedy criminal immigrants who will destroy “our way” of life, despite all the facts to the contrary, or the fact that I’ve been vocal about the need for immigration law reform.   

As I’ve repeatedly pointed out in my blogs, facts have become irrelevant.  Only image and emotion matter any more.  Each side picks the facts that support its views, and their images, and categorizes and objectifies anyone who doesn’t agree as the enemy. 

And those of us in the middle are becoming fewer and fewer, because we don’t agree fully with either “side,” and that means both sides view us as the enemy.

And then people wonder why there aren’t any compromises.