The false aphorisms of our fathers

I am puzzled--nay, not puzzled, but amused, or something close to it that mixes a grim resignation to laugh in the face of folly during our long march to the broad sunlit uplands with a desire to point out that I was right all along even though the point is now well past where that matters--anyway, I have gratefully noticed that two of the more annoying aphorisms of the past decade have entirely disappeared now, even though they're arguably more appropriate now than they ever were during the Bush administration.

See if you can place these in their proper context (cough, stimulus bill) but also recall the last time you heard a gleeful donkey utter them falsely about, oh, Iraq:

1. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.

2. The first rule of being in a hole is, stop digging.

Both of these dull ersatz witticisms were like having sand in your knickers--a dull, inescapably annoying presence which by all rights should disappear but doesn't. They basically offer as a substitute for actual argument, and are usually presented with a tiresome and entirely unearned sense of smug self-satisfaction. But these nonetheless were common phrases but a few months ago.

As we begin a, shall we say, experimental hair of the dog approach to combating the deleterious effects of the bursting of our recent credit bubble by spending everyone else's money in what will likely prove a vain attempt to re-inflate it, I surprisingly haven't heard Helen Thomas or Andrea Mitchell utter these aphoristic droplets of the wisdom of the gods; nor have I heard them lob up softball questions to an interviewee in a predictable attempt to elicit such remarks.

Has anyone else noticed this?

On balance I'd rather have the annoying folk wisdom but also a president who was bankrupting the country through more incompetence than malice than the reverse situation, which is pretty much what we have now. But, there you have it: I have identified a positive effect of the reign of Dear Leader! And you thought I couldn't do it.

Socialism lands in America

From today's Journal:

Obama to Shift Focus to Budget Deficit

By JONATHAN WEISMAN
With a $787 billion stimulus package in hand, President Barack Obama will pivot quickly to address a budget deficit that could now approach $2 trillion this year.

He has scheduled a "fiscal-responsibility summit" on Feb. 23 and will unveil a budget blueprint three days later, crafted to put pressure on politicians to address the country's surging long-term debt crisis.

Speaking Friday to business leaders at the White House, the president defended the surge of spending in the stimulus plan, but he made sure to add: "It's important for us to think in the midterm and long term. And over that midterm and long term, we're going to have to have fiscal discipline. We are not going to be able to perpetually finance the levels of debt that the federal government is currently carrying."

Gosh, do you think so?

In my household we prefer to judge whether we can perpetually finance the levels of debt we're carrying before dropping a massive sum of cash on something. We actually have a name for the process ("budget") and we rather quaintly think of it as "deciding whether we can afford it." Though admittedly it's swell if you can get in the drunken orgy of spending first, and then can forcibly extort enough to pay for it by threat of force like the government does, without you yourself going to jail for this, which most of us who aren't high-level donkey cabinet appointees can't pull off.

This is shrewd, if a bit obvious, in a Sun Tzu kind of way. After all, the senate hasn't yet completed its formality of voting on the bill no one has had time to read, and it's not been signed into law yet, so scheduling a "fiscal responsibility summit" to address what is now referred to as a "debt crisis" before he's even finished inking the monstrosity of a law that causes the debt crisis takes a special type of chutzpah, and frankly I'm envious because I'd never be able to say any of that with a straight face. The bit of referring to the resultant debt as a "crisis" is especially rich for anyone with enough imagination to anticipate the forthcoming "emergency" legislation to raise taxes (presumably only on 49% of us)which will be so crucially urgent to the survival of the republic that no one will be permitted time to read or debate the bill before voting on it. I hope they call it something really catchy because the clever focus-tested name of the law is usually the only enjoyment I get from these things.

But anyone who believed that any of this cool new cash giveaway was temporary and that eventually, after the economy is saved by Dear Leader, we'd restore fiscal sanity by trimming some of this, ahem, one-time emergency spending rather than raising everyone's taxes to European levels probably was the sort who believed he was the change he had been waiting for, or perhaps is just a member of the 51% of the country who pay no income tax.

Any republican or conservative who found some trancendental nonsense reason to vote for Dear Leader back in November, you've by now been slapped upside the head with the cold tuna of reality. Let me be the first to say, welcome back, and thanks again for your thoughtful vote.

It did finally dawn on me this week what's really going on with all this, in a macro sense. It's been pretty clear for years that a large slice of our fair republic embraced the part of the American dream that involved owning large houses and fancy "luxury" trucks and multiple plasma TVs and whatnot, and a large slice of that group simply discarded as the "failed policies of the past" the notion that one's ability to actually pay for those things was more than tangentially related to the act of acquiring them. And now, when we as a society have maxed out our credit cards and borrowed every cent of equity from our houses and had a losing streak at the racetrack, we no longer recognize the need to stop. We simply band together under the belief that all of our shitty credit scores amalgamated into a single giant US Treasury Mastercard can allow the lifestyle to continue, at least until that stops working and the Chinese decide that they'd rather invest their billions in fireworks or something instead of worthless junk bonds issued with the full faith and credit of a government long ago bankrupted by 51% of its own people, and by then all this will generally be someone else's problem anyway.

And the best part of it is, if you're one of those who think this is a good idea, there's at least a 51% chance that you won't ever have to pay for it either. Shazam!, and congratulations. Really, for that 51%, all this is a smart play; they have little to lose in the short term and will be hurt relatively less than the rest of us in the long term, so why not?

Not to say that we're totally fucked or anything.

The Ghoul Steps Aside

I'm delighted to read today that South Dakota wheat farmer Tom "the Ghoul" Daschle has withdrawn from his multiple appointments as Sultan of HHS and Healthcare Socialization Czar. The proximate reason for relieving the nation of what would surely follow from submitting the health care system to his tender mercies is that he is a tax cheat. An ordinary citizen, one who was actually subject to the laws imposed on us by our anointed political betters rather than levitating gracefully above them, would likely face criminal charges of tax evasion for his "oversight."

I've been slightly displeased to note lately that the same donkeys who so piously advocate taking more of my tax dollars as a matter of fairness, patriotism, etc, seem all to be tax cheats escaping from any real consequences of their willful transgressions. Charlie Rangel heads the Ways & Means Committee, which writes our fair republic's copious tax laws, though he himself seems not to pay his own taxes. Allegedly. And now alleged or admitted tax cheat Tim Geithner heads the federal department of which the benighted Internal Revenue Service is a part. In this context, BHO's nominee to the made-up playtime position of Chief Performance Officer ("Special Watchdog," quoth The One Himself) of an alleged or admitted tax cheat seems almost quaint in its embarrassing irony and general harmlessness. But Geithner heading Treasury boggles the mind. How can that man in clear conscience ever prosecute anyone for evading taxes, or even set rules and procedures for the supposedly evenhanded and just administration of our federal tax system? Cats and dogs lying down together, and the world has gone mad.

As many writers smarter and quicker to the pen than I have been have already said this week, it's no wonder donkeys advocate for higher tax rates...since they're all too clever, lawyerly, and politically connected to have to actually pay them. Badump-bump. Or is that not actually funny, but perhaps a legitimate criticism despite the sophomorically delicious symmetry of the presentation? The rule of law, even more than freedom and liberty, is what sets a civilized nation apart from a banana republic (freedom and liberty are what, within the pantheon of supposedly civilized nations, sets the US apart from France or Denmark, though our latest congress may be disposed in favor of dispensing with most of the things that set us apart from the Lands of Youth Street Riots). Arbitrary justice and arbitrary suspension of justice amount to essentially the same thing, and that a priveleged handful are quasi-exempt from the laws the rest of us toil under is unforgivable. Rangel and Geithner are clearly not penalized in the least for their offenses, which in the former case are ongoing for pete's sake.

Let's even be charitable for a moment, contrary to all appearances and to all of my established style of writing, and suppose all these multiple violations of the income tax code really are accidental. Unintentional oversights committed by some of the smartest people in the United States, each of whom possesses a vast familiarity with the workings of the federal government, and each of whom is wealthy enough to hire a batallion of CPAs and attorneys to ensure complete voluntary compliance with the internal revenue code. Yes, and let us suppose further that each of these civic-minded democrats who have achieved prominence within the party by decrying the greed of the rich and pledging themselves to the tireless pursuit of justice for the downtrodden and disenfranchised yearns desperately to comply with the tax code and pay their fair share of the burden of supporting the less fortunate. And let us suspend disbelief a further moment while imagining that despite the best intentions, they found themselves on the wrong side of the many byzantine twists of the 16,000 pages which make up the IRC.

Can there be a clearer indictment of the ridicularity of the whole social-engineering morass that is the IRC? Pray, brother Geithner and your elected masters in the federal congress, deliver us from the tyranny of the IRC and give us a tax code that actually makes sense. Alexander Hamilton's first federal tax code ran to three pages. If you really would like to see the tax gap eradicated and increase the productivity and profitability of small business, we could do so simply by deciding on whatever tax rate we want and applying it uniformly to all types of income. But that uniformity and transparency which you or I might find desireable traits of an elected government would strip our congressional masters of the power to select the winners and the losers, and to favor some constituencies and disfavor others. And wherever would they find the motivation to do such a thing?

Still, the Ghoul has been vanquished. We soldier on.