Deromanticising the Stone: Part Two

A few days ago, I took a look at a few of Gary Johnson's platform issues to take the sheen off his candidacy a bit. Now, it's Jill Stein's turn. Before we do that, I want to address the vaccines thing first. No, she didn't say vaccines cause autism or any of that nonsense, she said that pharmaceutical companies shouldn't be involved in regulating a product they stand to profit from. I understand the point, but vaccines are one of the safest medical technologies we've ever invented, so it's still not a very good one. Also, that same line of attack is one commonly used by actual anti-vaxxers, so using it and acting like it's a respectable point to discuss just gives those idiots a foothold of credibility in a conversation they don't belong in, so if you're attacking her statement for that, then by all means, do so.

With that out of the way, let's take a look at Stein' policy platform. Overall, I agree with most of it, and think the world would be better off if large parts of it were implemented. The glaring, almost fatal flaw of the whole thing though, is that as President, Jill Stein would have almost no power to actually do anything in her platform.

Take her economic initiatives.  

She talks about setting up a $15/hr minimum wage, of breaking up Too Big To Fail banks and democratizing the Federal Reserve, along with other niceties like equal pay, paid sick leave, and stronger worker protections. If you haven't spotted the common thread between these things, it's they all require new legislation from Congress to actually become things that happen in the real world. And I don't know if you've been paying attention or not, but Congress hasn't exactly been known for getting, well, anything done for the last six years. How  President Stein would get these rather controversial measures through a hostile Congress (because, make no mistake, the Democrats are just as hostile to those measures as Republicans) is left up to voter's imaginations, since Stein declines to actually recognize this as a problem on her website.

This pattern pretty much is her platform. On health, she wants to ensure Medicare for all in a country where the health care system devised by the very free market Heritage Foundation had trouble passing and has been characterized from day one as a government takeover of healthcare even though it is very much not. Also, that's still something Congress has to do. There's her Green Deal employment program, which basically seeks to retrofit the country's infrastructure to renewable energy grids by 2030. To do this, the funds would either have to come from new taxes or deficit spending and she would need a bill dedicating those funds to these projects. Which, again, Congress.

A lot of the projects and goals included in the platform are good ones, and even if we didn't achieve them, the results we would get from working on them would vastly improve our country. But there's a fundamental dishonesty at the bottom of this that undoes the lofty aspirations. Because, in truth, this is a legislative platform, not an executive one.  President Stein would have as much power to implement this agenda that regular, citizen Stein has, which is to say, exactly fuck all.  

When it comes to power in this country, and how government actually works, there is already enough confusion over who gets to do what. Since people don't understand the roles of the bodies of government, they take all of it on face value and elect Presidents on promises they don't have the power to keep.  And this ignorance is exactly the thing Jill Stein is trading and playing off of, her entire platform is built on it and takes the legislative gains as a given. It's a platform built on
the fantasy of its goals instead of laying out how to actually achieve them, which makes it little more than worthless. 

You can say "Well that's what Democrats and Republicans do," but if your goal is to provide a different political vision, one that is better than the mainstream body politic, than you can't really engage in the same underhanded tactics of the people you're trying to usurp.  Because at that point, instead of trying to change the game, you become a lightweight fighting a heavyweight, and losing is all you'll do or deserve.

Deromanticising the Stones: Part One

Over this election cycle there have been many, including me, calling for more options and treating third party candidates as valid electoral options to combat the strangle hold of the two-party system. I stand by that belief, but the tendency of too many who offer up Gary Johnson or Jill Stein do so in a way that makes them sound like political saviors solely because they aren't Republicans or Democrats. So, if we're going to be advocating these people as serious alternatives, we need to look at their policies with as much scrutiny as we would the mainstream candidates.


We'll start with Gary Johnson, since he is the more popular of the two and the only one with any legitimate chance of reaching the 15% threshold to get into a national Presidential debate. Johnson runs on the Libertarian ticket, and as such, engages in a lot of the same bugaboo issues of pretty much all right wing political figures. He calls the national debt, which is projected to hit $20 trillion by 2020, unsustainable and the biggest threat to our national security. This is, quite frankly, stupid. It is literally impossible for a country to default on a debt that it issues in its own currency; it's never happened before, and there has never been a compelling argument as to why it will happen in the future. Johnson also talks a big game about balancing the budget while he was Governor of New Mexico, but since New Mexico's state constitution requires a balanced budget, this feat isn't so much an example of his daring-do as a leader so much as it is an example that he can meet the bare minimum requirements of the job.


Johnson has also talked about eliminating both the personal and corporate income taxes, in the hopes that doing so will spur economic growth and investment. This plan, like Trump's and Sam Brownback's, is pure fantasy. Massive tax cuts have never produced their promised economic benefits and the data proving that is widely available to any who bothers to read it. For Johnson to push this claim like it's still a credible idea undermines his whole schitck that he only wants policies that make sense and are proven to work. Rather, it proves that just like every politician, he's committed to enacting policies that match up to his ideology no matter how those ideas fare in practice when implemented in the real world.


His idea of converting the tax code to one based on consumption rather than income is equally ridiculous. Johnson claims that the current tax code is too bureaucratic and convoluted- that we should only be taxed on what we spend rather than what we make. 

But here's the thing, how is he going to know what people spend? 

 Does he really expect people to save all their receipts and then tally up their total spending in a year and then do the math themselves to figure out what they pay? More importantly, how is he going to make sure people aren't skimping out? If Johnson eliminates the IRS, than the government will have no reliable way to collect or verify that it is being paid what it is owed from its citizens. Johnson's plan isn't going to simplify or make the government efficient; instead, it will fundamentally cripple the government to the point where it is incapable of accomplishing well, anything. Edit: After thinking about this some more, I think Johnson's idea is more of a federal sales tax than what I said above. This is still a pretty terrible idea, though, since the states will have such a shortfall in federal funding that they'll have to drastically raise all of their taxes to break even or cut services and programs to the point of non-existence. In that case, whatever extra money people get from the no income tax will be eaten up by whatever new stuff the states impose just so they can survive. (Also, Johnson throws out the 100,000 employees the IRS has as an example of excessive government jobs, but when you consider that the IRS has to monitor and regulate 300 million people and 18 million domestic business alone, that 100k seems paltry in comparison.)


To be fair, not everything is that bad. The bulk of Johnson's policies follow the pattern of identifying legitimate issues but having misguided or self-defeating solutions to those issues. His policy page on education, for example, repeats the very old line about how the best thing for our education policy is to introduce more "competition" to our public school system, which means more charter schools. To put it mildly, charter schools are no great success story; on average, they tend to do just as well as regular public schools do. So the primary "competition" isn't doing a better job than what's already there, so nobody develops a better way to educate and everything just continues its slow, steady decline as public and charter schools squabble over ever-dwindling public resources.


His environmental plan has the same problem, but with a dash of irony for good measure. Johnson says that the government shouldn't be picking winners and losers in the energy market and that the government shouldn't be pushing regulations that "kill" jobs. These talking points are parroted from the oil, natural gas, and coal industries, who you might recognize as the biggest polluters on the planet and are also, by sheer coincidence, the largest beneficiaries of government subsidies in the energy industry. So, in effect, the government is already picking winners and losers and if, to quote Johnson, "the first responsibility of government is to protect citizens from those who would do them harm, whether it be a foreign aggressor, a criminal — or a bad actor who harms the environment upon which we all depend," then by his own logic the government owes it to its people to make better choices regarding what kind of energy policy is provided to them. 

 This clash of "the government must protect the people, but is wrong to take any proactive steps to do so" is the inherent contradiction of Johnson's political philosophy, and no matter how reasonable he sounds on TV when he presents his ideas, that contradiction will doom him to failure.


So, that was a look at some of Johnson's proposals and the problems of his style, next, it'll be time to see the Doctor. Hopefully the wi-fi you used to get here won't have melted your brain.

Mainstream Maverick

On Monday in Detroit, Donald Trump put on his best Big Boy pants, busted out the teleprompter, and tried to look like a grown up for an hour when he delivered a speech laying out his economic plan.  For a guy who has set much of the Republican establishment on fire over the last year, it's actually a but disappointing (if only for lost entertainment value) that Trump's speech is an essence just a copy/paste of every Republican economic speech over the last 30 years.

Trump continued his attacks against free trade agreements like the TPP, saying he'd withdraw from it outright, and that he'd renegotiate NAFTA so that it becomes a "win for America."  As far as this goes, I have no major policy complaints; from what we know of the TPP, it's not going to be good for anyone except multi-national corporations suddenly free to hold on to their extended periods of time and being able to sue governments over any policy that might jeopardize future profit margins.  NAFTA is also on my shit list for driving down wages in the U.S. and destroying a lot of local industries in Mexico.  The thing though, Trump bad mouthing these things isn't actually a plan.  His comments about both trade agreements were little more than his usual Twitter rants filtered through coherence and better sentence structure.  If you're going to say that you're going to renegotiate NAFTA to better benefit American workers, than your plan should lay out how the current deal is fucking over those workers and what you're going to do about it.  There was none of that in Trump's speech, meaning that even when his speechwriters lay out the words Trump is going to say beforehand the best they can do for him is just "NAFTA! BOOO! HISSS!"  

But seriously, Trump goes on at length about how he's going to make the trade deals great for America again, but every single time, he's somehow neglected to mention how he's going to do that.  At best, he just blathers about how he'll negotiate "better" and at worst he just throws up slogans like on Monday about how these deals will miraculously become everything America wants by virtue of his demanding the rest of the world make it so.  Really, his focus on trade is just red meat he needs to throw out to the crowd so they'll too busy chewing on that to notice that he never really bothers to lay out his (what one assumes is) the amazing, just amazing, things he's going to do to make job grow on trees in the Rust Belt again.

And, of course, there was the tax cuts.  Trump decided to back off his previous tax plan, which would've added $10 trillion to the national debt in ten years, by making the dramatic revision of... having three tax brackets instead of four.  The rates are marginally higher this time around, being 12, 25, and 33 percent instead of the 0, 10, 20, and 25 of his initial plan, and there aren't any new studies out yet measuring its impact, but honestly, I wouldn't expect the result to be any different.  Trump also made a point of saying that all corporations would be taxed at 15% instead of 35%.  The idea is that if corporations have more money on hand, they'll hire more people.  The problem with this line of thinking is that corporate America already has trillions of dollars in cash reserves that, if they wanted to, could have already used to hire who knows how many numbers of people.  Another problem is that this line of thinking deliberately misunderstands what employees are to their employers; they aren't assets, they're costs. That means that, on the corporate side, if they're already achieving near record breaking profits (which they've been doing for much of the Obama presidency) they have no incentive to increase their payroll costs, because, well, what would they actually need those people for?  Also keep in mind that cutting the corporate income tax increases a businesses profits but doesn't actually increase their sales, workload demand, or business expansion, you know, the thing that actually determines whether businesses actually hire people.

But if all that just seems to theoretical for you, let's look at the two biggest tax cutters in recent memory, George W. Bush and Sam Brownback.  Even if you're being generous to Bush the Younger and don't count the job losses in early 2008 as the runoff of the financial crisis, he still has the worst job growth of any President since the Great Depression.  Brownback, who was swept into the Kansas Governor's office in 2010, cut both personal and corporate income taxes to almost zero, promising a flood of job and riches for all under the sun.  Instead, Kansas has gotten years of budget crises and a job growth rate of 0.1 percent between January 2015-January 2016. A whole hundredth of a percentage point worth of growth in a whole year, huzzah.  At this point, the idea that cutting taxes will spur economic growth for all involved is less a policy idea and more of a dogma upheld by the ignorant and the delusional.

Overall, the speech encapsulates the problem with Trump's candidacy, he's really good at whipping people into a frenzy by nurturing and exploiting their grievances, he's even better at convincing those people that he's actually intelligent and competent enough to solve those grievances.  But when it's time to put up and prove that he actually has a plan to do so, all he can come up are vague slogans and the same failed ideas that have been vomited up for decades now.  I mean, I always figured Trump's policy ideas would be just empty space and cobwebs, but I just thought he wouldn't crib the cobwebs from literally every Republican before him,