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.