Last Sunday, The New York Times had a front-page story on the problems faced by students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. While the story highlighted the specific problems of three minority females, my wife the university professor sees the same problems played out by white students in a state university with a very small minority population. Despite an apparent proliferation of loan and aid programs for students of modest means or less, the graduation gap between economically poor students and those of more affluent means is now wider than it was thirty years ago. Although the graduation rates of most ethnic/economic subgroups have improved, the rates for those of means have improved far more than that of those from poorer backgrounds.

Why has this happened? There are a number of reasons, and the Times article, frankly, didn’t emphasize nearly enough some of the root causes. The principal reason, from what my wife and I see, is that the growth of tuition has outstripped the growth of available grants and scholarships. The reason for the growth of tuition at state universities is not, contrary to popular opinion, because of high salaries for full-time faculty, not at a time when most state institutions have been freezing salaries or holding raises to one or two percent, or reducing full-time professors and replacing them with part-time adjunct faculty, but because for almost a generation, state legislatures have been reducing the funding of their public institutions at the same time as enrollments have continued to increase. Higher enrollments require more buildings and larger classes, or more classes taught by less qualified instructors… and, most important, higher tuition.

At my wife’s university, and at all the public institutions in the state, funds for scholarships and grants, even federal grants, have not kept up with the cost of tuition. If colleges and universities offer full-tuition and room-and-board scholarships, then the number of available scholarships goes down as tuition rises. If they offer the same number of scholarships, then those scholarships no longer cover tuition and room-and-board. Either way, that means that economically disadvantaged students must either borrow funds or find part-time or full-time work. My wife has watched student after student become swamped with debt or spending so much time working that they cannot spend the time to study and to succeed academically. In addition, all too many have other problems created by their past, such as poor study habits and even worse judgment. More affluent students also have these problems, but they often have personal safety nets, such as parents who can support them while they waste too much time learning with bad study habits and behavior that detracts from academic success.

In addition, in many fields, merely taking classroom courses isn’t enough for future success. For example, in the hard sciences, students need to take laboratory courses, and those are invariably later in the day – and often students who work find themselves in an impossible situation. If they try to follow an educational path that would pay more in the future, they can’t work the hours they need to pay for that education, yet taking a more “standard” curricula ends up giving them a degree with a major in a field that is already glutted. The majority of students who succeed in music and the performing arts – and many do, despite the rhetoric – are those who not only take the classes, but who do all the extra activities, which include performing and rehearsing long hours, often without credit. This becomes almost impossible for students who are entirely self-supporting, except for the one or two that come along every few years who are truly brilliant and gifted, and even for them, it is close to impossible.

But each year the situation has become worse as the legislature funds less and less, and tuition climbs, and professors’ incomes are frozen, and more adjuncts are hired, and poorer students work longer and longer hours and get deeper and deeper in debt.

All of this doesn’t even take into account the fact that primary and secondary schools are failing to instill certain basic skills required for both academic and occupational success. When more than a third of all students graduating from secondary schools do not have the writing skills to compose – without electronic aids – a single coherent paragraph, and when the majority lack any semblance of analytical skills, it’s no wonder that students who are preoccupied with finding the money to even attend college are dropping out or failing in huge numbers.

But the great debate remains about how federal and state taxes are too high.

Years and years ago, back when I was actively involved in national politics, a scholar of politics made the observation that, “Where you stand on anything depends on where you sit.” The converse is also true, in that the positions one takes reveal the true nature of one’s views.

The “negotiations” surrounding the “fiscal cliff” illustrate the above point fairly clearly. The positions taken by each side do indeed reveal where each side sits, so to speak, and whom they represent, regardless of the window dressing of the rhetoric thrown out by each side. The Democrats are demanding that the “rich” pay more in taxes. Interestingly enough, their definition of “rich” includes all of what has historically called the upper middle class and even a fraction of the mid-middle class, i.e., moderately salaried two-earner families in high-cost-of-living cities. The definition of “rich” has been muddied over time by inflation, but consider that a family income of $42,000 in 1970 is equivalent to more than $250,000 today, yet in 1970, forty percent of all families made more than $42,000. Today, only 2% make more than $250,000. President Obama classifies those in the top 2% as the rich, but those in the ninety-ninth percentile have family incomes of between $250,000 and $350,000, and that one percent pays ten percent of all federal income taxes. Well-off certainly, but rich? All this does suggest that Obama and the Democrats, rhetoric aside, are out not only to soak the rich, but also to soak the upper middle class.

The Republicans, of course, aren’t exactly blameless. For all their rhetoric about controlling spending, they haven’t. In fact, they’ve more than helped it along, and then they’ve coped with the erosive power of inflation by simply pushing for lower tax rates. After all, in the end, what matters isn’t what you make, but what you keep. So, as inflation has decreased the purchasing power of the dollar, so that the real income of most families is only some 60% of what it would have been without inflation, federal income tax levels on the top ten percent, and especially on the top one percent, have been more than halved since the 1950s. The result? Although all income levels have suffered in loss of comparative purchasing power, the greatest burden has fallen on those in the middle two quintiles of income, what generally might be referred to as the working class, because their tax rates have not decreased as much as those with higher incomes, and because federal programs have tended to cover most of the impact on the very poorest. The Republicans’ “Plan B” was even more deceptive in that, while it would have protected the upper middle class from a tax increase, it not only did that, but it would have removed the few limitations that do exist on restricting tax exemptions for the very wealthy… and Boehner couldn’t even get the enough Republicans to support that.

When all the math and tax policies are considered, the politicians have been paying for federal programs through deficit spending that has reduced the purchasing power of all incomes, although, like it or not, those families in the lower 50% of income only pay 3% or so of federal income tax. The Democrats have done their best to shield the very poor, because programs such as food stamps are essentially indexed against inflation, and the Republicans have done their best to shield the very richest one percent, and continue to do so, even with the fiscal cliff looming, and everyone in between has taken a hit of some degree… and both Obama and Boehner are holding out in the fiscal cliff negotiations for the best deal they can get for the very rich and the very poor – and if they do come to an agreement, they’ll call it a benefit for the middle class.

According to not only a study cited in The World 2013 [published by The Economist], but to an array of other sources, there’s a growing gulf between what employers need in the way of skills and what the schools are producing. And contrary to popular and political opinion, or the latest pop/political fix of STEM [science, technology, and mathematics] education emphasis, the greatest problem is that students don’t have an adequate grasp of problem-solving skills or other basic skills [like an adequate command and understanding of their own language]… yet 70% of the students believe they do, and something like 70% of employers believe they don’t.

Based on what my wife the college professor has observed in recent years, and on studies in the field, over 80% of the students cannot take information presented to them and use that information to solve problems or come up with the answer requiring very basic reasoning. And according to their SAT/ACT test scores, these are bright students. Furthermore, most of them cannot retain information that they have heard, or read, even when told that retention of that information will be necessary. They have a slightly higher retention rate when the information is presented in visual/video format, but not a significantly higher retention rate. Their attention span is generally less than ten minutes for any given subject.

The percentage of undergraduate students with these difficulties varies, generally with the selectivity of the college or university, but between 25% and 40% [depending on the methodology used] of all those who receive an undergraduate degree are effectively functionally unable to communicate or receive written/text communication effectively.

Is this a totally new phenomenon? Unhappily, it’s not. Older college professors can recall students with these problems dating back at least thirty years. The problem is that, back then, there were fewer of them, because the more rigid secondary schools basically pushed a significant number of them away from higher education, and of those who did enter college, far fewer of them got degrees and graduated, simply because they couldn’t recall enough information to pass difficult courses.

There are several aspects of the problem that tend to get ignored in this era of “I can look anything up.” First is the fact that in order to be able to look up relevant information, one has to have enough of a knowledge base to know what to look up. Second, one has to have the underlying skills to know what to do with that information. Having the fastest thumbs on the planet and the greatest screen/eye-to-hand coordination equates to incredibly fast reaction times, but doesn’t equate to problem-solving skills.

As I have noted in the past, more than once, basic problem-solving and language/communication skills MUST be learned young. By the time students are 18 or so, their brain patterns are set. Second, no matter what anyone wants to believe, not every student can or can be motivated to learn these skills. Effective teaching on the primary level in particular can maximize the number who can, but not all can learn such skills. The idea behind No Child Left Behind is a politically popular delusion that is destroying effective education. People have different basic intelligence levels, and while some of that innate intelligence can be enhanced or depressed by environmental and social factors, only a small percentage of the population will ever function at the highest – or lowest – levels.

Trying to craft an educational system that “prepares” all students in the same fashion is an exercise in frustration, ineffectiveness, and wastefulness. But there is also an immense accompanying socio-political problem, and that is that, particularly in the United States, people tend to respect only a handful of skills – those of professional athletes, those of popular entertainers, and those who are rich and famous. These three groups amount to less than 1/10 of one percent of the population, and the chances of success in any of these areas are incredibly slender. There is little real respect, for all the lip service paid, for teachers, police officers, and others who hold society together, because lip service pales alongside the financial negligence. The professors at my wife’s university, for example, and for that matter at all the state universities in our state, have been frozen something like six times out of the last 18 years, and the few cost-of-living allowances have been on the nature of 1% to 2%. The salary levels for beginning teachers in our area, and likely in other areas as well, are less than $1,000 a year above the poverty level for a family of four… and most young teachers here are married. Very few doctors can afford either to be general practitioners or to practice in rural areas or many inner city areas because what they can earn won’t cover the cost of their educational loans… and their malpractice insurance.

Yet, in many areas, good-paying positions are unfilled… because young people can’t be bothered to be electricians, plumbers, air-conditioning technicians, high-tech welders… the list is significant… and all too many of the “schools” that profess to teach such trades are inadequate, and charge far too much.

Do I have a simple answer? No… I don’t, and I don’t believe that there is one… and because there isn’t, and because no one really wants to tackle complex issues any more in a culture where information, such as it is, is only one mouse-click away, I worry that it will be some time before the situation changes.

On the economic front, the Unites States faces a double problem – a huge continuing federal deficit and a weak economy, not to mention the fact that taxes will jump considerably in less than three weeks, and a number of federal income support payments will be cut off, unless the President and the Congress can work out something.

From what I see, almost no one is looking at the overall problem. They’re all concentrating on the symptoms, and each group is focusing on its particular interests and wants.

One of the questions that’s been raised is how can the economy be so weak when business and corporate profits are so high. Although industrial profit margins vary considerably from year to year, on average, regardless of how profit is calculated (on equity, sales, revenue etc.),the profit margins of the S&P 500 have more than doubled over the past thirty years, rising from around five percent to between eleven and fourteen percent. In 2012, corporate profits as a percentage of sales hit an all-time high, while the percentage of Americans working dropped to the lowest level in 30 years. Wages and salaries are now at the lowest percentage of gross domestic income (GDI) since statistics have been kept, and have dropped from the historic range of around 55% of GDI to just over 44%. That amounts to a massive shift in income away from workers to owners and businesses, roughly $1.5 trillion annually – and that’s money that’s not being taxed or spent at near the rate it would be if it went to workers.

Not only that, but the additional corporate profits aren’t funneling back into the economy, either through increased dividends or increased employment. All this results in significant loss [more accurately, a lack of growth] in federal tax revenue at the time when federal spending is increasing. Those who demand a corresponding decrease in federal spending seem to fail to understand that the vast majority of the increased federal spending has gone to prop up the economy in one way or another, either through increased joblessness benefits, food stamps, or the financial community bailouts. Without that additional federal spending we would be, not in a great recession, but in another great depression.

What the large corporations fail to acknowledge, as noted in the previous blog, is that their cost-cutting and “efficient” personnel management techniques, are contributing significantly to the problem. Since the United States is essentially at best a self-contained economic system, because we are not a net exporter of goods and services, but a net importer, we cannot sell massive amounts of goods abroad to compensate for domestic economic weaknesses. That means that when wages and salaries go down – or stagnate with a growing population – so does domestic demand for goods and services. That means companies strive for greater efficiencies, and those efficiencies come largely from “employee efficiencies.”

One of the fastest rising employee costs is health benefits, and the larger corporations have addressed this through automation, fewer employees per unit of output, and greater use of part-time employees who are not paid benefits. The Affordable Health Care Act attempted to address the growing number of Americans without health benefits, but the way in which it was finally passed appears to impact disproportionately, as many Republicans have noted, smaller businesses. In effect, large corporations, through their management practices, have effectively shifted their past health care costs onto small business and government (i.e., all taxpayers). This, unhappily, isn’t anything new. Business has always attempted to shift costs onto someone else, whether environmental, infrastructure, or social costs, and always trumpets “jobs” and “free enterprise” as a rationale for not paying for the costs it imposes on society.

At the same time, U.S. tax policies, particularly corporate tax policies, have only made the situation worse. Although the United States has the highest “official” statutory tax rate of any OECD/industrialized nation in the world at 35%, the effective corporate tax rate for U.S. corporations averaged 12.1% in 2011 – and that was lower than all but one nation out of the top 34 industrial nations. That 12.1% rate is the lowest effective rate for U.S. corporations in the last 40 years. How does this happen? Tax breaks, subsidies, and a tax structure that does not tax overseas profits until or unless those profits are transferred back to the U.S. – where they’ll likely face the 35% rate [since they’d already have been transferred if the corporations had any way to tax shelter them]. Well… if you can’t or won’t transfer those billions, if not trillions, of dollars in overseas profits back to the good old USA, what can you do with them? Build more facilities overseas, of course. Since business tax breaks and subsidies are largely legislated on a political basis, this also results in economic inefficiencies. All this doesn’t exactly help the U.S. economy… or American taxpayers.

Then there’s the financial sector, whose indiscretions, greed, and mass speculation created the economic crisis, and whose major players are still reaping multi-million and multi-billion dollar bonuses… and a significant portion of whose income is taxed at a lower rate than that of most middle-class wage earners.

So… what can be done?

Knowing that no policy-maker will ever have the nerve to suggest anything along the lines of what follows, I’ll still suggest a general framework that I believe would work, not that workability has a damned thing to do with political feasibility… but who knows… someone might actually get desperate enough to try some of these.

First, stop tying tax increases to political rhetoric. Instead of demanding a 4% increase on higher earners, just ask for 1%… and cap their personal deductions in the range of $35,000-$40,000, while eliminating the alternative minimum tax. What no one mentions is that these folks are already going to pay a 4% additional tax on all their investment income beginning in 2013, as required by the Affordable Health Care Act. Second, drop the statutory corporate tax rate to 13-15% — and repeal every single exemption and subsidy. Then allow them to send profits back to the US – but credit them with a dollar for dollar reduction in tax liability for every dollar paid to another country in income/profit taxes. Third, impose a sliding-scale part-time employee surtax on every corporation with more than 100 employees, that surtax being based on the number of part-time employees not receiving health benefits. Couple that with a sliding scale tax credit for small businesses [20 or fewer employees], allowing a credit of some additional percentage of health care insurance costs per employee. Fourth, and this is an idea floated by Eliot Spitzer, impose a transaction tax of between ¼ and ½ of one percent of the value of every financial transaction in the securities and commodities markets. This would raise at least $200 billion annually, and might actually recoup some of the costs that the financial sector dropped on everyone else. It also might reduce the millions of computerized speculative trades made to try to profit on second-to-second price changes. Fifth, tax all dividend, interest, bonuses, and carried interest income [and any other “preferred” income] at the statutory rates, but allow the current lower tax rate for dividend and interest income to remain for the first $50,000-$100,000 [indexed to inflation]. That way, those middle-class individuals who scrimped and saved for retirement wouldn’t be penalized for their thrift, but multi-millionaires wouldn’t be paying absurdly low rates on massive income.

Anyway… those are my suggestions, not, as I said, that anyone in Washington is likely to listen.

A number of our friends, acquaintances, and even at least one relative are victims of the new discrimination.  They include a university lecturer, a Walmart employee, a professional classical pianist, and a daughter who works with the disabled… and there are millions of Americans like them.  Who are they?  They’re the part-timers, the nearly thirty million plus Americans who work less than full-time, the majority of whom do not receive benefits, particularly health benefits. And the number of part-time employees in American business rises every year, so that part-timers are approaching twenty percent of the workforce.

More disturbing than this is the fact that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), almost all the increase in part-time employment since 1969 has been involuntary, in that employers have only offered those additional jobs as part-time, and in the majority of cases, employers are creating multiple part-time jobs rather than fewer full-time positions. There’s an economic rationale behind this, as shown by a 2012 BLS study that indicates full-time employees’ average hourly pay is some 60% higher than that of part-timers.

Over the past ten years the number of part-time jobs has doubled, while the number of full-time jobs has decreased by around nine million positions.  Even the current “positive” numbers in the decline of joblessness mask the fact that full-time jobs are continuing to decline, while part-time jobs are increasing at a rate faster than the decline of full-time positions.

Much of this change in the composition of employment is the result of computerization and statistical managing, because better data and software allow employers to use only the staff they think they need, and with the emphasis on profitability and the cutthroat nature of retailing in particular, the costs of fluctuating demand fall almost entirely on the part-time employees, rather than on management or permanent full-time employees.

In addition to financial costs, the increasing reliance on part-time employment creates stress and uncertainty among the part-timers. For example, a 2011 study of retail establishments in New York City showed that fifty percent of employees were part-time, and only about ten percent of the part-timers had fixed schedules on a week-to-week basis. The other problem with this increasing “management efficiency” in managing labor costs is that it makes it harder and harder for part-timers to cobble together two part-time positions in order to make ends meet because there’s less and less certainty in when they will work and for how long. This impacts everything from what they can afford to dealing with children and childcare.

While there’s a perception that temporary and part-time employment is largely confined to the retail and service industries, and to people without advanced training and education, that’s a complete misconception. Despite the growth of colleges and universities, and the increasing number of students graduating, the faculty composition over the last generation has shifted from being roughly 70% full-time to almost 70% part-time (or adjunct faculty), and with the passage of the Affordable Health Care Act, most state colleges and universities will have to either reduce the hours that existing part-time faculty teach and hire more, and likely less qualified adjuncts, if they can find them because the total compensation will decline, or add more full-time faculty, which the states cannot afford to fund.  This same problem will also affect hundreds of thousands of businesses as well.

Temporary employment in jobs requiring technology, business, computer, and other higher education skills has almost tripled in the last 30 years, and the temporary staffing and employment field was the largest growing employer segment in the United States over the last three years.   More and more businesses are laying off full-time skilled people, but hiring them, or others, back part-time as consultants.

The bottom-line?  American business – and higher education — will do anything to minimize labor costs, and that means – unless government gets more involved in labor policy and regulation – that more and more American families are going to see either a stagnation or a reduction in their real standard of living.  This has enormous implications for everyone, not just for those part-time employees.

What business and the politicians don’t seem to realize is that, as they move to a more “efficient” part-time workforce, there will be fewer and fewer full-time employees, and given the cost –pressures, and the threat of replacement by part-timers, even the full-time employees will be, and are, except for top management, compensated at a lower “real” level.  Both full-time employees and especially the growing ranks of part-time employees will have less and less money to spend on the goods and services that they provide.  Consumer demand over the past five years has been supported by a level of government borrowing that cannot continue indefinitely, or even for more than a few years. The only people immune to or insulated from this down-sizing of real income will be a comparatively small number of individuals with skills or positions of power.

Yet, the process of each business maximizing its labor “efficiency” results in a diminution of overall baseline purchasing power… and, unless the question is addressed on a society-wide basis, could result in an economic death spiral… if the social unrest created by the results of such headlong pursuit of “employee efficiency” doesn’t result in violent political upheaval first.  We’re already seeing signs of this in the growing support for Obama’s position on taxing the top two percent, because what most people don’t realize is that this is the first time ever in American history that a majority of the people have been in favor of tax increases on the well-off.

Will anyone in power really read the handwriting on the wall?

The other day, I came across a reader review of one of my books, which described it as formulaic.  And I’d agree… and I’d also call the reader who wrote the review either lazy or an idiot, if not both.  All books are formulaic, at least all books that more than a handful of people want to read.  Books require the formula of passable style and grammar, although better style and grammar are definitely a plus.  They require the formula of a plot of some sort.  They require the formula of some sort of resolution. In short, a book is an organized formula for providing entertainment or information, and possibly a great deal more.

So what do lazy idiots who use the term “formulaic” really mean?  According to A Handbook to Literature, “formulaic” is a term “applied to a work that relies excessively on set patterns of plot, character, sentiment, and language.”  The problem with this definition is that all fiction relies on patterns of plot, character, sentiment, and language, and that there is no standard for defining “excessively,” except in the mind of the reader or reviewer.

As a writer, once I’ve set the parameters of a story, I try to make the systems and the characters true to themselves, if you will.  The magic systems or technology are consistent throughout.  The characters develop more as the story progresses, but those developments are a result of who they are and what happens to them. This, frankly, creates a problem for some readers, because people behave like people.  They seldom do strange things, and when they do, it’s for very good and logical reasons, at least to the character in question, and much of what shock there is in what I write comes from characters taking situations and abilities to their logical ends in order to accomplish what they feel is necessary. Formulaic?  I don’t think so, because I don’t find it “excessive,” and most of my readers don’t seem to… or if they do, they like that kind of order and organization.

Part of determining what is “excessive” is strictly a matter of personal taste.  While technically I think George R. R. Martin is a good writer, I find his use of violence and brutality excessive, and I could claim that his best-selling series is “formulaic” on those grounds.  The same could be said of Piers Anthony and his Xanth books, given the incredible overuse of puns.  And I, or any other well-informed reader, could make a similar case for any number of well-known and even critically acclaimed writers.

As in the case in many instances of comments about books, the use of the term “formulaic” may reveal far more about the reader or reviewer who uses the term than about the book being reviewed because, as I said at the beginning of  this commentary, in the broadest sense of the word, all books are formulaic.

Last week the Utah congressional delegation all affirmed that they would be true to their principles and oppose any tax increase for anyone, rich or poor. That got me to thinking, as such sweeping generalizations often do.  Over the years, there’s been a current of approval, in commentary and even in popular song, for people who have insisted on being true to their principles.  I have a problem with this.

In 1861, the leaders of the Confederacy decided to be true to their principles, those of states’ rights embodying the idea that states had the right to hold people of color in slavery and to buy and sell them as property. Following those principles, they led their states into secession.  Earlier, the Catholic Church held to the principle that torturing and killing people to “redeem their souls,” and then officials of the Anglican Church retaliated in various ways based on various principles. Then there was this fellow by the name of Adolf Hitler, whose principles included the idea that people who weren’t of Ayran genetic heritage were inferior, especially Semitic peoples, particularly the Jews, and that ethnic cleansing and mass extermination were principled.  He was certainly true to his principles to the end, even using railroads and troops to continue killing Jews when they could have been used to fight against the allies invading the lands he had earlier conquered.

I may just be an iconoclast, but I guess I just don’t see much virtue in being true to principles that are either suspect – or wrong.  Now… I know, “wrong” is a judgment on my part, but we do have to make judgments in life.  The problem, of course, is determining a moral basis for such judgments, and that gets into a detailed discussion that has consumed much time and effort, both on this blog and throughout human history.  Still, there are some areas of consensus, such as the fact that human slavery is wrong and that killing people solely because of their religious beliefs is as well… and there are certainly others. Likewise, there are the cases where valid moral values clash – which is what makes the abortion debate so thorny [if human life is sacred, and the mother will die without having an abortion, how does one choose without destroying one “sacred life”?].

In the pending “fiscal cliff” political situation, one side’s principles state that “rich” people should pay more – or at least they shouldn’t pay lower effective tax rates – than poor and middle class families because the society in which they live has allowed them to receive more.  The other side’s principles state that, in effect, that tax rates shouldn’t be increased on just those who make more.  Both sides are insisting on being true to their principles while the country faces a possible return of recession if the issue isn’t resolved and long-term financial crises if the overhanging issue of excessive deficit spending isn’t resolved.

Perhaps I’m just being a curmudgeon, but I don’t see much moral value in either side “being true to their principles,” particularly since both sets of principles being touted are flawed.

Why do people vote the way they do… and believe what they do?  A growing number of studies show a link between attitudes linked to heredity and political beliefs.  The issue has gotten hot enough that one U.S. congressman spearheaded an amendment to the National Science Foundation budget last May to cut a billion dollars. While the amendment failed, Congressman Jeff Flake’s second amendment to the NSF budget – one that banned any NSF funding of political science research – did pass, because Flake did not want the NSF funding research into the biological roots of political behavior.

According to a recent article in the British New Scientist, “there is a substantial body of data suggesting that conservatives and liberals really are different tribes, divided not by opinions so much as by temperament and even basic biology.”  Also interesting is the fact that the article and research were written by Americans and published in a British science magazine.  The article itself is comparatively even-handed, pointing out correctly that most research in the field is conducted by liberals and that there are difficulties with some studies.  But one of the underlying problems is that, by temperament and biology, the majority of scientists in most fields, excepting those involving engineering and directly related fields, tend to be “liberal” in outlook and politics.

All that said, more than 25 years of study indicate that political attitudes have a high degree of inheritability, and such studies include identical twins raised in totally different environments, who are far more likely to share political attitudes than do fraternal twins or genetically unrelated family members.  As a rule, but not invariably, conservatives are more likely to prefer people of their own ethnic background, straight people, and high-status groups.  Liberals are more comfortable than conservatives with those of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, as well as with members of ethnic or sexual minorities. Liberals tend to be more morally offended by inequality, while conservatives tend to be more morally offended by betrayals of the in-group, by disrespect for authority, and by signs of sexual or spiritual weakness or impurity.  These characteristics have been linked to anatomical differences in the size of various brain structures.  Conservatives have a higher need for certainty, while liberals tend to revel in mental challenges.

In this regard, I’ve always had the feeling that conservatives can’t find the truth because they’ve known it all along, whether it’s true or not, and liberals will never recognize it because they’re so involved in looking for the next thing that they’ll look right past it.

What is clear about all this research is that all of us are biologically inclined in a certain direction in what might be called our social outlook, some more so than others, whether that direction be conservative or liberal.  What is also true is that each of us does have the ability to examine those predilections… and to decide whether blindly following our feelings makes sense in any given situation or whether we need to examine what we feel more closely. Obviously, both outlooks are necessary in human society… or those with one inclination or the other would have been weeded out or marginalized, and given the near equal polarization in political outlooks in the United States, that hasn’t happened… and that means, again, blind insistence on doing either just the “conservative” thing or the “liberal” thing is counterproductive.  Working out a compromise is necessary.

Unfortunately, I don’t see many signs of this happening in our political situation here in the United States at the moment… and it’s something that needs to occur.  As a society, we can’t afford to follow blindly just one of the genetic predilections that evolved to make us successful hunter-gatherers. Nor can we turn our back on what science is revealing about who and what we are. Those are recipes for disaster in a high-tech complex world.

The “business model” has triumphed again.  Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, a holiday first officially celebrated in the entire United States on the last Thursday of November as a result of a Presidential proclamation of Abraham Lincoln in 1863, and then moved to the fourth Thursday of the month by Franklin Roosevelt, in order to give the country an economic lift. Little did Roosevelt know what he started.

This year, from Wal-Mart on – or up – retailers across the United States invaded Thanksgiving with “Black Friday” specials on Thanksgiving Day itself.  Oh, there were Wal-Mart employees protesting at hundreds of stores, but the shoppers largely ignored them and surged into stores, greedily grabbing whatever specials they could find.  From my antediluvian viewpoint, the invasion of Thanksgiving by rampant commercialism signifies, in both a metaphorical and practical sense, that the majority of Americans have become totally unaware of how fortunate we are as a society.  Can we not set aside a single day out of the entire year in which to consider and reflect on those aspects of life for which we are grateful?

Last year, at this time, I cited a short story by Frederick Pohl called “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus,” published in 1956 and set in a future where the “Christmas season” begins in September, and I wondered how long it would be before Halloween and Christmas squeezed out Thanksgiving.  Based on the blizzard of ads in my newspapers – more than fifty separate ad sections – on Thanksgiving day itself and the media hype of Black Friday beginning on Thanksgiving, it appears as though the original purpose of Thanksgiving has already been all but lost to the “ecstasy of unbridled avarice,” to steal a quote from another Christmas staple.

Then again, perhaps people who cannot maintain a Thanksgiving tradition deserve exactly what they are getting from the businesses who push Black Friday – lots of cheap goods produced all too often in third world sweatshops by people who have little to thank anyone for, fewer and fewer good American jobs…and more than a few business leaders who insist that paying lower tax rates than their underpaid employees is necessary for jobs creation.

With the so-called fiscal financial cliff facing the United States government after December 31^st, there are likely to be those in the public calling for cuts in “non-productive” federal spending, and one of the perennial candidates is federal spending on basic research in any number of fields, particularly in areas such as solar power and expensive physics research. Some advocates of such cuts claim that the private sector, and in particular, the corporate world, can take up the slack, and some cite the failures in federal research choices, such as Solyndra, the solar power company that received a $535-million federal loan guarantee as part of the $787 billion economic stimulus package… and then went bankrupt.

In point of fact, there is a real distinction between basic scientific research and the follow-on development of a new scientific breakthrough into a practical product.  While the private sector can develop new products far more effectively than government can, the private sector is seldom willing to undertake the basic research necessary to make the breakthroughs from which such developments can be made… and the reason is simple.  The vast majority of basic research fails to make such a breakthrough.  Estimates of the failure rate range from 80% to 99.99%.

What is also overlooked is that negative results of research are positive.  They show approaches that will not work and often point the way to those that will.

Thomas Edison tried over 1,000 different substances before he was able to find one that would serve as the filament for a light bulb… and some sources claim it was closer to ten thousand.  Edison is quoted as saying, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  Octave Chanute, the forgotten mentor of the Wright Brothers, listed hundreds of failed attempts to developed powered flying machines, as well as almost 60 detailed illustrations of different major serious attempts that failed before the Wright Brothers flew. More recently, Bill Gates pointed out that funding basic research naturally has a high failure rate, and that more than 90% of the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency’s projects will likely fail.  Gates went on to note that the U.S. government’s investment in energy research was woefully underfunded and called for a government investment of $16 billion per year into basic research to deliver energy innovation.

Even the one of the most profitable areas in return on research – the pharmaceutical industry – has staggering costs. According to Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, “The average length of time from target discovery to approval of a new drug currently averages about 13 years, the failure rate exceeds 95 percent, and the cost per successful drug exceeds $1 billion, after adjusting for all of the failures.”

The truth of the matter is that, first, the future economic health and physical well-being of the United States depend on continued extensive scientific research, research that a private sector dependent on short-term profitability largely cannot and will not make, and that, if government does not fund such research [and the education of those who will make the such breakthroughs, from whatever part of the globe they come from to be educated in the United States], scientific breakthroughs will be made in countries whose governments do fund that research… or not made at all.

Yet too many penny-wise and pound foolish politicians fail to see the difference between basic research and the subsequent development and exploitation.

Because I’m a writer, I do tend to judge people, to at least a certain extent, by the way in which they employ words, either spoken or written. And because my wife is a university professor, as is another professor temporarily residing with us, the subject does come up occasionally.  In addition, because Cedar City is a university town, we all know other professors and instructors. And… given all that, there is one subject about which all those we know in this field agree:  the vast majority of students matriculating at the university in the past few years are incapable of writing an essay test – about anything.  And most aren’t that much better at writing anything of any length, even with their computer and the internet to help, although some are adept at plagiarism, which they think of as cut and paste.

In the past, while there were some students who had problems with this kind of writing, most students could at least make an attempt that resembled an essay.  In the last two to three years, however, the situation has reversed itself, to the point that, in my wife’s current class, at least so far this semester, not a single student appears capable of writing a coherent essay test… or even a three-sentence short answer.

Mind you, this is despite the fact that the university has become more selective in admitting students, and that scores on the ACT and SAT are higher than ever. Of course, that might suggest that the ACT and the SAT have been dumbed down, but I don’t believe that.  I’ve talked to many of these students, and they’re intelligent.  They just can’t organize their thoughts in written form if they don’t have access to electronic aids, and even when they do, the results are usually pathetic.

Needless to say, this scares me… more than a little.

One of the great benefits of learning to write an essay on a test, or under pressure without computer back-up, is that to be successful, a writer has to organize words, facts, and concepts into a coherent and persuasive form with an underlying structure and logic… and these young people don’t seem to be able to do that.

Part of this is that they also have either great difficulty in remembering facts or no interest in doing so — or perhaps both – and it is difficult to write anything factual that is meaningful without a mental knowledge base.  The ramifications go far beyond writing, because without such a knowledge base, individuals have no factual internal framework by which they can judge the world around them, and their judgments and decisions become governed more and more by their emotional responses to what others have said or done most recently.  This phenomenon isn’t limited to the young, of course, but it appears to be more prevalent there.  How else can one explain the wide-spread lack of understanding about the number of political candidates who flip-flopped on their positions over the course of the last year – and how many people there were who claim that the “media” made it all up?

We’ve already forgotten that electronic books can be re-written without the knowledge of their users, and with a generation that is reading fewer and fewer print sources, and doesn’t seem to want to learn facts in a permanent way, how long will it be before whatever appears in their personal-media-electronica at the moment is the only reality there is to most people?

Or… have we already reached that point?

The day after the elections, Robert Murray, the owner and CEO of Murray Energy, the largest privately owned coal company in the United States, laid off  156 employees, claiming that the Obama administration was waging a “war on coal.” Murray offered a prayer with his announcement, part of which stated:

“The American people have made their choice. They have decided that America must change its course, away from the principals [sic] of our Founders. And, away from the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility. Away from capitalism, economic responsibility, and personal acceptance.”

What makes this statement both ironic and hypocritical is that Murray Energy is hardly a pillar of responsibility. Since 2000, the Ohio EPA has cited Murray’s American Century and Powhatan coal mines for coal slurry leaks on seven occasions, twice for leaks that lasted days and turned more than 20 miles of Captina Creek black. Murray Energy also owns the Crandall Canyon Mine in Emery County, Utah, which the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) fined $1.8 million for violations that directly contributed to the death of six miners in 2007.  What is worse is that the company ignored MSHA warnings that the operating conditions were unsafe.

All this shouldn’t be surprising, given that Murray Energy and its subsidiaries have one of the worst safety and environmental records in the mining industry. It also shouldn’t be terribly surprising that Robert Murray has been criticized widely for coercing employees and miners to attend a Romney fundraiser – without pay – and has spent years attacking EPA, OSHA, and MSHA for “overregulating” the coal industry.

What bothers me about Murray, and the Koch Brothers, and a number of other Republican industrialists who trumpet the need for free enterprise and less federal regulation is that they’re not talking about reducing bureaucratic nit-picking and regulations that don’t make sense, of which there are more than a few, but about basic environmental and safety regulations.  Murray clearly wants to build cheap slurry ponds, despite repeated failures of those ponds that have polluted streams and sent toxic wastes into water supplies.  He opposes regulations on dangerous forms of mining as a restriction on “free enterprise.”  He’s opposed dust control measures in mines, despite the fact that coal dust causes black lung disease.

In practice, “free enterprise” advocates like Murray want to be free to make money, regardless of the health and environmental costs they impose on others.  That’s not really “free enterprise,” because taxpayers shoulder much of the burden of cleaning up waste spills; other businesses suffer; the families of dead miners suffer greatly; and the government/taxpayers end up paying Social Security disability and Medicaid costs for workers whose health is destroyed by poor working conditions.  And of all of this, Murray and others like him seem to be unaware – or they feel that imposing such costs on others is their right in a “free enterprise” society.

So-called “free enterprise” isn’t.  No business enterprise is without costs, both internal and external, and the question is who pays those costs. Murray’s lay-off of employees is just another example of an egotistical and self-centered businessman who has no understanding of the costs his actions impose on others – nor does he care, except for his profitability, for all of his pious rhetoric [and poor grammar].

So… when you cite the need for free enterprise, think carefully about how free you want it to be… and who really pays for that “freedom.”

The election is over… and the change favors, clearly but not overwhelmingly, the President’s program [and not necessarily the Democratic agenda], despite any rhetoric from the right.  What is also clear, however, is that the American people expect both parties get to work and hammer out solutions, rather than standing on extremist rhetoric.  What support for that claim is there?  For one thing, in districts or states where the demographics weren’t overwhelmingly loaded on one side or another, the majority of true extremist candidates from either party who were seeking either re-election or election were unsuccessful.  For another, there were more women and minorities elected to the Senate and the House, reflecting a wider perspective than the “rich white male” viewpoint largely represented by the current Republican Party, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.  And at a time when the Republican Party advocated massive change and when most Americans have expressed concerns about the direction of the country, the Republicans actually lost seats in both the House and the Senate. That’s anything but a mandate for continuing obstinacy.  Yet Democrats must also realize that gaining a few seats and winning the Presidency by only a few million votes is also not a mandate for pressing radical agendas.

In practice, this means, if the President and Republican leaders are serious about bringing the nation together and resolving the fiscal cliff and other problems, that each party is going to have to give up some ground.  The Democrats are going to have to stop avoiding the fact that government cannot continue deficit spending indefinitely.  They should stop insisting that professionals who make $250,000 are “rich,” and they’re going to have to broaden the tax base to make sure that more of the “47 percent” who pay no federal income tax pay at least some tax, because, like it or not, Social Security and Medicare taxes don’t pay for federal government programs. They’re also going to have to take a hard look at existing federal programs and cut back or eliminate those that are wasteful or not critical. They’ll also have to realize that because the economy is still fragile, the necessary effective increases in taxes need to be gradual and minimal… and not targeted at any one group. They also need to realize that the Republicans are not wrong about everything, that such proposals as tort reform and a rethinking of the entire corporate tax structure are in fact vital and necessary.  They also need to recognize that “wealth” is not income, and that even though a tiny minority of Americans has too great a concentration of wealth, for overall continued economic prosperity, government cannot redress that balance through immediately slapping huge higher taxes on the “rich.”

The Republicans, on the other hand, need to realize, first of all, that “no” to everything is not a viable agenda for the good of the country.  They also need to understand that when too many people have too little income, they cannot make ends meet, let alone purchase goods and services that fuel business growth and jobs expansion.  They also going to have to swallow effective increases in taxes, whether through allowing rates to rise – but gradually – or through the elimination of excessive tax breaks – such as mortgage interest deductions on mansions and multiple homes and the elimination of favorable tax treatment of classes of income available only to the truly wealthy – such as carried interest for hedge fund traders and managers.

Both sides need to come to agreement on a viable immigration policy, since the current non-policy is essentially based on “don’t look and don’t do anything,” an approach that blocks the most valuable individuals from immigrating to the United States and ignores the discrimination and abuses imposed on the children of illegal immigrants… not to mention the enormous waste of government resources and human potential.  Again… simply putting up fences won’t work, especially once the economy recovers.

I’ve scarcely touched the surface of what needs to be addressed, but the same parameters apply to the other problems – practical and workable compromises are necessary, and standing on inflexible “principled” rhetoric will only worsen the problems.  Nor will promising “compromise” with rhetoric, but failing to offer substantive concessions to the other side.

None of this will be anything but tortuous, and painful…but it is necessary. Will it happen?  I have no idea… but I can point out the necessity to everyone I can… and hope.

I’ve spent much of the last week here in Canada – at the World Fantasy Convention – and have spent some enjoyable hours with Canadian colleagues and friends I don’t see too often, which is not surprising, since I don’t live exactly near Canada, and since too much traveling means far too little writing. It’s also been quite interesting to see the Canadian perspective on the coming U.S. election, including an observation in the Globe and Mail, one of the largest newspapers in Canada, that most Canadians don’t understand why the U.S. election is even close, because most Canadians can’t fathom why there is widespread popular support for Mitt Romney.

Part of that arises, I suspect, because Canadians don’t understand the furor over Obamacare, and there are doubtless other reasons I don’t know. I also suspect those in the United States who support Romney would claim that it’s because the Canadians are all “liberals,” but Canadian politics have trended toward the more conservative in recent years, and the current Canadian prime minister is from the conservative side of Canadian politics [admittedly less radically conservative than the American right wing, but clearly not liberal in most senses of the word]. Certainly there’s no doubt that Canadian banks were and remain far more conservative than are American banks, a fact explained by a Canadian friend’s tongue-in-cheek observation that the United States got more Irish immigrants, while Canada got more of the tight-fisted Scots.

One of the aspects of the Romney campaign that appears to ironically amuse many Canadians is how Americans seem to be blind to… or just ignore… Romney’s blatant flip-flops and vehement denials of proposals and statements that he himself made just months before. That doesn’t exactly surprise me because, over the years I’ve observed that a greater percentage of Canadians I’ve met tend to consider ethical questions somewhat more deeply than do the Americans I know who share similar backgrounds to their Canadian counterparts. You could also say that perhaps it’s because Canadians lag in “adjusting” to the “realities” of the twenty-first century, since their culture isn’t, at least yet, so highly permeated with reality shows, graphic violence, and endless tweets and twitters… and thus, they don’t seem to understand the necessity of continually changing their self-presentation to meet each new situation in the way in which Romney and all too many other American business and political leaders clearly excel.

Whatever the reason, there’s definitely a different outlook from north of the border.

Today, it appears that the schism between science and religion is greater than it’s ever been.  But why should this be so? Historically, a great many of the Founding Fathers were religious, yet believed that science and the pursuit of facts were not only in accord with a belief in a higher power, but were necessary elements of that belief.

Let’s start with the basics.  There either is a higher power – call that power God for lack of a better term – or there is not.  If God exists and created the universe, then that universe was created with a set of rules, because without consistent principles, all of the ordered matter we observe and measure, including us, would not exist. Since we and the universe do exist, there is an organizational pattern behind that creation. One of the goals of science is to discover that pattern, and at times, to replicate it.

As a matter of fact, that scientific search for the nature of God was the underlying theme of Robert Sawyer’s 2000 novel, Calculating God, in which scientifically advanced aliens visit Earth and attempt to enlist Earth scientists in their efforts to search out and verify the existence of God.  For true believers in a deity, wouldn’t this make sense?

Yet, in today’s United States, when scientific discovery goes against theology, the reaction from most religious bodies seems to reject the science rather than the theology.  Why?  Wouldn’t affirming a better understanding of God’s universe bring true believers closer to understanding and affirming their deity?  And wouldn’t denying what has been proven be in effect a denial of that deity?

If there is no God, isn’t believing in tenets put forth on behalf of that deity misguided at best, dishonest and hypocritical at worst, especially when those tenets go against physical evidence?  If there is “only” a “clockwork God,” as postulated by some, a higher power that created the universe and left it to its and our own devices, effectively the same issues still apply. In all three cases – God exists and remains involved in human affairs; God is only a clockwork God; and there is no God – insisting on a religious doctrine about the world and the universe which conflicts with what science has discovered and proved is unethical, and if God does indeed exist, denying science and what it has discovered is in fact denying God.

Any scientist worth the title will admit that there are things science cannot explain, or cannot fully explain, but there are many things which science has determined that are in conflict with some religious doctrines or the beliefs of some true believers.  Evolution does exist; the world and the universe are far older than 4400 B.C.;  human-caused global warming does exist; all the human population of the world except those on the ark was not destroyed by a global flood [although scientific inquiries do suggest that the Black Sea – not all that far from Mount Ararat – was created by a massive flood when the Mediterranean Sea broke through what is now the Hellespont].

Now… those of you who are believers and who deny any science that conflicts with those beliefs… just pray to your God… and explain to Him why you deny the way in which He has built the universe. Just tell Him that you reject those who are trying to understand the universe better – the scientists.  Go ahead… it shouldn’t be that hard.  You’ve been telling the rest of us that for years… Go on…tell God you deny the principles of His universe.

According to the latest issue of Scientific American, science has created high-paying and productive jobs in the United States, and science is the only way to create them in the future.  Certainly, both candidates for President seem to agree with the need for high-paying jobs… or at least pay lip service to the idea. And the Republicans, especially, are pounding on the need for more high-paying and productive jobs.

So why are so many Republicans so anti-science? Why do they deny evolution, global climate change, vaccination, the seriousness of air pollution, and other findings?  Early in 2011, Mitt  Romney made a speech in which indicated that it appeared global warming was human-caused, then quickly made an about-face after Rush Limbaugh blasted him.  John Huntsman, on the other hand, said that the Republican Party couldn’t “run from science,” and not quite coincidentally came in last among all the Republican candidates.

Science was one of the guiding principles of the Founding Fathers.  Benjamin Franklin was one of the world’s leading scientists of his time, although this aspect of his accomplishments often tends to be downplayed.  Thomas Jefferson believed deeply in scientific endeavor and even created his own inventions.  John Adams extolled the scientific method and the verification and use of facts.

So why has there been such a surge in anti-science sentiment in recent years?  And why especially among Republicans [not that Democrats are immune]?

Part of the anti-science movement may be based on the desire for quick and simple answers, and science doesn’t work that way.  Scientists set forth theories, and other scientists try to disprove them… and often they do… or often they discover that one theory is an approximation of the way something works, and a later theory gives a better explanation.  Science is, if you will, methodically messy, and this century’s “truth” often is later discredited.

For all of its messiness, science has a far better record in explaining both the world and how things work than does religion, and yet Republicans in ever-greater percentages are choosing religious rationales and explanations over science. Perhaps it’s the fact that a conservative mind-set values “certainty” in beliefs over something that changes… or maybe religion is more comforting.  Yet these same Republicans certainly wouldn’t turn in their car for a horse and buggy.  Nor would they prefer the medicine of 1850 to that of today, no matter how much they complain about the costs.  They embrace all the physical advantages of science while rejecting the methodology… and anything in science that conflicts with their religion or beliefs.

Not only is this philosophically hypocritical, but it’s a fundamental threat to the future of the United States. Interestingly enough, both candidates are campaigning for better education in the science-based disciplines of engineering, mathematics, and other hard sciences… and yet in state after state Republican lawmakers are passing anti-science laws… on the grounds, largely, that impartial science education undermines religious freedom.  John Adams would be appalled to discover that religious freedom requires the suppression of unpleasant facts and theories and that “religious” theories with no basis in fact must be given “equal time.”  He’d also be appalled to find that politicians are attempting to insert religious beliefs into law under the guise of freedom of religion.

And so should every American.

It’s more than fair, and accurate, to say that the coming Presidential election is about leadership, about who can best lead the United States out of the current less than favorable economic conditions and who can best deal with the myriad of international challenges facing the country.

That said, what exactly is leadership?  What shows leadership?  Is effective political campaigning and debating a good indication of leadership?

My wife made the intriguing but obvious observation that being the challenger in difficult times is far easier than being the incumbent, because all the challenger has to do is declare that times are hard and that they’re not getting any better quickly, and it’s the incumbent’s fault, and that the challenger can do better.  In essence, that was Obama’s advantage against McCain in the last election, especially since President Bush had just presided over the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, and since McCain was the Republican candidate and a long-time Republican officeholder. Now, Obama is no longer the challenger, but an incumbent who has come to realize, painfully, that inspiring words are not enough to get a divided Congress to act, and possibly that nothing is, and yet he is being held fully accountable.  That’s the nature of incumbency, even when the problems were not of the incumbent’s making, just as the financial meltdown was not totally of President Bush’s making.

What disturbed me about Obama’s first campaign and Romney’s and Obama’s present campaigns is the lack of substance and specifics.  Admittedly, Obama sticks closer to the facts, and he’s tied by his actions to more substance, not all of it good, but, as I’ve discussed earlier, and as Paul Ryan once again demonstrated in the Vice Presidential debate, and Romney has in all three debates so far, the Republicans are playing looser and faster with the facts than in any campaign I’ve witnessed [and that goes back some fifty years] and offer few if any specifics. Oh… I fully understand why this is so, and so does Obama, who avoids unpleasant specifics when he can.  Every single substantive proposal will create more opposition than support, because those who support it will be outweighed by the violence of those who oppose it.  In addition, substance takes time to present, and the media and the American mindset is geared to sound-bites, and almost no one wants to listen for very long.  So simple and practical sounding slogans trump substance.

The thirst for simplicity is also because we have the most complex government and technologically-based society in the history of the world, and simple and easy proposals invariably don’t work in practice in such a society, no matter what anyone claims.  Even when simple slogans are absolutely correct – such as, we can’t keep spending more than we have – no one really wants to look at the details, and the most successful candidate is almost invariably the one who manages to avoid dealing with details in a campaign.

So leadership appears to be measured by popular appeal, and popular appeal is determined by what people can understand and support – except that the vast majority doesn’t want to take the time to learn anything in depth about the problems and consider whether a candidate’s proposals actually make sense… or even whether a candidate has flip-flopped or contradicted himself or denied what he’s on the record as having said or done.  It all appears to be based on how impressive the man is compared to his opponent…and it helps to be taller as well.  Shorter candidates seldom win.

But does mastery of political campaigning translate into leadership? If you look at Warren Harding, Jimmy Carter, and the second President Bush, it doesn’t.  On the other hand, if you take Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan, it does.

Maybe a coin flip would be just as accurate.  It would certainly be cheaper, and it might remind the candidates that they don’t have a mandate to try to run roughshod over those who don’t agree with their simplistic slogans. Then again…

Charges have been flying back and forth between the Romney and Obama camps and their partisans, each charging the other with lying, while the most anyone might admit is to a “slight” exaggeration.  So how are we to tell who is “merely” exaggerating for political effect and who is the bald-faced liar?

That’s easy.  My candidate exaggerates just a little; yours is a bald-faced liar.

An exaggeration, perhaps?  From what I’ve heard and seen, not at all.

Romney denies that he said what he said, and his campaign calls it political maneuvering. Romney’s lying. On the other hand, Obama keeps declaring that he’s only going to tax the wealthy, when the specifics of both Obamacare tax increases and his own proposals will definitely have a significant impact on a significant share of the middle class, since some of those taxes kick in at incomes above $100,000, and a family making $100,000 may be “wealthy” in Plano, Texas, or Richfield, Utah, but that’s barely mid-middle class in New York, San Francisco, Honolulu and most of Hawaii, Los Angeles, the Washington, D.C., area, and a number of other places across the United States, totalling tens of millions of Americans. Now, none of those directly affected by his tax plans are in poverty, but to call them wealthy is not only inaccurate, but an out-and-out lie.  I could go on and attack both sides with more specifics, but that’s not the point.

Now, I could say “a pox on both your houses,” because both candidates are guilty of lying, and the only question is which one is the greater liar.  Unhappily, that’s really almost secondary to another question.

I’ve heard die-hard Republicans claim that Obama will destroy religious freedom, annihilate the free-enterprise system, gut our national defense, destroy American womanhood, make abortion free and legal at any time in a pregnancy, and, oh, yes, increase taxes on everyone. They’re right about the last one, because, regardless of Romney’s rhetoric, eventually taxes will have to increase no matter who is President.

Die-hard Democrats aren’t much better, claiming that Romney will create a nation ruled by the ultra-wealthy with wages and incomes falling for everyone else, that he’ll outsource as many jobs as possible to China to keep wages and costs low in the USA to profit the few and the wealthy, a charge not helped at all by David Siegel and the Koch brothers, raise healthcare costs for everyone, but especially to the poor and elderly to the point where few of them will be able to afford medical care, totally destroy a woman’s right to choose by making her carry any pregnancy to term, even if she was raped or the pregnancy will kill her, and, of course, cut taxes on the wealthy while eliminating most deductions to raise taxes on the middle class.

There are grains of truth in both sets of charges, and sometimes even more than that, but this campaign of either lies or reckless exaggeration – take your pick – is more than likely to leave a residue of anger and bitterness that will make actual solutions even more difficult than they’ve been in the past – and we know how few solutions have been considered in Congress, let alone enacted.  No matter who wins the Presidency, it’s highly unlikely that either political party is going to have a sufficient majority in both the House and the Senate to push through its agenda… or anything close.

That means, as I’ve said before, solutions will require compromise, but who will be willing to compromise after all the lies and scorched earth rhetoric?

Unless things change, this election may be the political equivalent for the winner of “the operation was successful… and the patient died”… the patient being the American semi-bipartisan representative democratic experiment created by the Founding Fathers.

Recently, there was yet another hullabaloo here in Utah over “cronyism,” this time in the administration of the state prison system, with charges and countercharges and the head of the prison system resolutely declaring that there was no favoritism, while the rank-and-file claim that standards of performance and conduct for the top administrators are far more lax than for most employees. That’s on top of continuing charges that the Republicans support “crony capitalism,” while they deny it and claim that free enterprise rewards the best and that Democrats who attack any form of capitalism are socialists or communists… or something like that.

The plain fact of the matter is that, in some form or another, cronyism exists everywhere in society, from rich Republicans to LGBT activists, from country clubs to welfare mothers.  It exists because human beings like to form groups and most groups are formed from people with at least one overriding shared interest, if not many.  The individuals in most such groups tend to think in the same fashion and the more insulated a group is, the more likely this is to occur.  As one example, a recent study whose results were noted in the Christian Science Monitor found that wealthy individuals who lived and interacted primarily with other wealthy individuals gave far less to charitable causes than did wealthy individuals who interacted with and had daily contact with those of poor and modest means.  In fact, the more insulated wealthy, on average, contributed 50% less as a percentage of their income than did the less “insulated” wealthy.  Another study found that men who had more than one daughter were markedly more sympathetic to so-called women’s issues, such as equal pay and equal employment opportunity, than were men with only a single daughter or no daughters.

None of this should be surprising.  Many groups follow their unspoken group consensus… and then are surprised to find, or even deny vehemently, that they are practicing cronyism.  They’ve never considered it.  It’s just the way they operate.

Generally, for example, here in Utah, the vast majority of politicians are members of the LDS faith, and they tend to pass laws which reflect the patriarchal nature of the culture.  There are continual charges of cronyism, some of which are definitely founded, such as the recent appointment of the director of the Board of Regents.  One of the finalist candidates, the director of the commission on higher education in a midwestern state, was asked to apply.  He had a Ph.D., had received his undergraduate degree and master’s degree from a state university in Utah and had taught at a Utah university for a number of years, then gone on to high level administrative positions in other states, where he served with distinction for some fifteen years.   When he arrived for his interview, one of the first questions he was asked was whether he’d ever been in Utah before – and he’d been requested to apply and had sent a complete resume which listed his Utah connections!  The legislature selected the former director of public affairs for the board, who has never taught full-time, never actually run any organization, and does not have an advanced degree.  From the news releases surrounding the appointment, it was fairly clear that these politicians weren’t even conscious of their cronyism.  They picked someone with whom they were comfortable, and seemed unaware of the fact that other qualifications just might have been better and/or more appropriate.

I’ve also seen the same sort of group-think on the other side, when the upper administration of a university in an eastern state was controlled by extraordinarily left-wing women, who seemed honestly to believe that no man under any circumstances could possibly be interested in anything but finding a way to dominate and oppress women and minorities.  While the male historical track record in dealing with women and minorities is nothing to brag about, this attitude seemed a bit excessive to me… and the result of the attitude was that, for a time, essentially no men were considered for higher positions and even women who didn’t buy into the mindset were marginalized… the result being what amounted to feminist cronyism.

From what I’ve seen, as illustrated by these two examples, a great deal of cronyism arises from people being uncomfortable with people who have different backgrounds and viewpoints, and, often, a lack of awareness that, at times, no unbiased interpretation of the facts would support their views.  The problem we as a nation face is that high technology allows groups greater self-selection, and that greater self-selection promotes a more monolithic view in each group, with the result that the groups operate as though their view is the only one that has any validity.

Might this just be another factor in the growing political and economic polarization in the United States?

Earlier this week, the Salt Lake Tribune published a story featuring a memorandum that David Siegel sent to all his employees, including those in Utah.  In that letter/memorandum, Siegel declared that, if income taxes and corporate taxes were raised by those elected to the Presidency and the Congress in the forthcoming election, he would be laying off employees.  Siegel is the owner of a number of resort oriented businesses in Utah, as well as the founder and chief executive of Westgate Resorts, the largest privately owned time-share company in the world.  He and his wife are also building the largest home in the United States, a 90,000 square foot edifice called Versailles.

In follow-up interviews, Siegel declared that his letters were not a threat, but a fact based on the economics of business.  Of course, speaking as someone who’s had a little training and experience in economics, politics, and business, the economics of business aren’t exactly that clear-cut. Some business owners might consider other factors besides having enough profit to build and operate the largest private home in America.  Warren Buffet, for example, one of the wealthiest men in the world, still lives in a very modest two-story house.  Bill Gates’ generosity with stock and stock options for his employees made those who worked for him in the beginning very well off.  And there are many other founders of businesses who don’t glory in saying, “You’re fired!”

Obviously, any business that loses money over a period of time [unless it’s subsidized in some fashion, either in the way in which Amazon subsidized its predatory ebook pricing or some other fashion] will eventually have to close, but as any honest accountant can tell you, there are innumerable ways to make a profitable business look unprofitable, as those in the movie industry well know. It’s one thing to claim that increased taxes will have a harmful effect on very small businesses – those, for example, with ten or fewer employees. But in a business with thousands of employees and millions, if not more, in profits?

Like it or not, all too many businesses treat employees solely as a necessary cost, rather than as a source of revenue and more business.  The Darden restaurant group, for example, is “experimenting” with requiring more employees to be part-time so that it won’t have to provide health benefits.  If this “experiment” is successful, other restaurant chains will follow in order to keep their profit levels up, but no one seems to ask what the overall economic cost will be.  When people have to spend more money on health care out of pocket or get sick or have the government and hospitals pick up the tab through unpaid emergency room visits, all this does is shift costs from the restaurants to everyone else.  It may be good “business economics,” but it’s lousy societal and national economics.

What all these “sharp” business economists are talking about, whether it’s complaining about environmental regulations restricting their pollution, being required to provide healthcare insurance, or paying corporate taxes, is essentially an effort to shift costs from their operations to everyone else in order to increase their bottom line… and what bothers me is that so many Americans seem ready to buy it.

In the end, everything costs.  The only question is who pays and how.  In a “truly” fair system, everyone would pay their share.  The problem is that those who are poor often cannot, and that means that, if they are to eat and have health care, for example, someone else must help.  In addition, many lower-paid employees don’t make enough to afford health insurance if it’s not provided in some fashion through their employer.  How such burdens are distributed, assuming the poor are not to be left to suffer and die, requires government intervention, since human history clearly indicates that not enough individuals will do so, or can do so, on their own initiative.  I don’t have a problem with that, provided the distribution of that burden has some semblance of thought and fairness.  What I do have a problem with is businesses and corporations who have negative impacts — financially, environmentally, and in other ways – citing “economics” as a justification for not even carrying their own weight, especially in cases where it’s clear that their founders and CEOs are living the extraordinarily high life.  Like David Siegel.