Remember a year and a half ago, when I wrote this?
That’s what I’m aiming for. I want every new season of American television to have one comedy or drama depicting the savage hypocrisy of representative government. I want The Weft Wing, an Office-style mockumentary about a bunch of ambitious Harvard and Georgetown grads who figure out new euphemisms for “bombing civilians.” I want The Big Push Theory, a sitcom about four nerds who run a think tank that drafts leading opinion polls. I want Reno 911 but played straight-faced and set in Atlanta. I want Larry David’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I want stories without heroes, filled with awkward laughs and abrupt fades to black.
Armando Iannucci heard my prayers and delivered. HBO subscribers, tune in every Tuesday to “Veep”:
If you weren’t sure whether or not to watch this show, ask yourself: do I find the Professor’s political cynicism tiresome? If so, avoid. If not, subscribe.
(P.S. You can catch the entire first episode on YouTube, uploaded by HBO themselves! Don’t take my word for it)
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday urged the U.N. Security Council to take action over the rioting in Britain, arguing it was hypocritical in its reaction to such events.
[...]
“The U.N. is silent. Human rights bodies are silent,” Ahmadinejad said on state radio following a Cabinet meeting. “If one percent of this happens in countries that oppose the West, they scream until they are hoarse.”
“Why is the Security Council silent?” he said, also questioning its willingness to take action directed at one of its five veto-wielding permanent members.
He meant the following (c/o Yahoo! News and some serendipity; click for larger cap):
I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be; virtuous enough; swore little; diced not above seven times a week; went to a bawdy-house once in a quarter—of an hour; paid money that I borrowed, three or four times …
With Bobo it’s always a question of how far I can get without openly guffawing, spraying water out of my nose and upsetting the neighbors. In Monday’s column, it was this gem:
The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.
Lawd. In the century that’s already given us the Iraq Civil War, the Military Commissions Act, the Wall Street bailout and Fergie’s solo projects, defaulting on a debt would “stain their nation’s honor.” Oh no! Failure to raise the debt ceiling! At long last, have you no sense of decency?
And whence this icky stain, Brooks? Not from the awkwardness that would result as China, Japan and the U.K. pass the debt to each other, unwilling to make the phone call that would collapse the world economy. No, this stain would come from the United States breaking its sacred pledge to pay back money it borr– ah ha ha, oh ho, ho ho ho, ha ha ha, hrrm, sorry, give me a second. Ah ha. Hooooo. All right, I’m good.
Anyhow, Brooksie’s confused because, to paraphrase Mencken Sinclair, his job requires that he stay confused. If he doesn’t believe in his heart of hearts that the Opposition Party really wants to shrink the size of government, he’s out of work. He has to keep mistaking pretext for cause. And sure, if you believe that the Opposition Party is driven by the principle of reducing the size of government, and that their only failure is extremism in the pursuit of frugality, then I’ll bet they look like they’ve been “infected by a faction” (Brooks).
But if you believe that the Opposition Party wants power not to enforce a small government agenda but for its own sake, that they’re taking advantage of a “fiscal crisis” in which any economic fallout will be blamed on the Ruling Party and that they’re refusing to compromise not out of fanaticism or dishonor but because refusal to compromise makes you look strong and voters love strength more than peace, then the present becomes less baffling.
The Opposition Party has not been infected by Tea Party madness, any more than a man with a leashed pitbull needs to check his own stool for worms, rather than the dog’s. The Opposition Party wants power. It sees inflexibility in budget negotiations as the road to power. The Ruling Party wants to keep power. It sees any crisis that can be linked to its refusal to raise the debt limit as a threat to that power.
I never thought I’d be quoting David Frum with approval, but he sums it up more tersely than I can:
[I]t looks like Obama has set up yet another lopsided bargaining table: He needs the Republicans to give him something, anything, that he can claim as a victory. This need, however, perversely puts the Republicans in the situation where if they give him something, anything, it will be represented as a defeat. The president’s own weakness has had this perverse effect on his political opponents: it has reduced the value of his own concessions (no matter how big) and hugely exaggerated the significance of any offset he achieves (no matter how small).
I agree with all of the above except Frum’s bitter sigh at Obama’s “weakness.” Obama’s not in the strongest position to help his party out, but his need for concessions doesn’t make him weak. When you’re in the top spot, you have the most to lose.
[P.S. I put this post on the spike on Wednesday, prior to Obama's announcement that sure, he'd be willing to cut some Social Security if it'd make the Opposition Party happy. Leaving the post as-is because I don't think this changes the context. Whether the Ruling Party cuts benefits by adjusting the COLA or whether this is just, as the Administration's biggest fans assert, Obama playing 11-dimensional chess, is irrelevant. Whether you would take to the streets if Social Security were touched or whether you want to dismantle the welfare state is irrelevant. What matters is that the fate of Social Security will be decided by people who, come age 65, would never notice its absence. Never forget where power is and what power wants.]
I’m growing less fond of political labels for several reasons: somewhat due to the growing similarities between the Ruling and Opposition parties; somewhat due to laziness. But the recent dust-up over Nir Rosen illustrates why they’re no longer useful.
Following news reports that a CBS news reporter had been sexually assaulted by a crowd of Egyptian men while reporting on the protests in Cairo, Rosen – a member of the NYU Center for Law and Security, a sometime correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and Time, and a widely read expert on the Iraq War – posted the following to Twitter:
it sort of depends who it happens to. sometimes we have to find the humor in small things.
jesus christ. at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should remember her role as a major war monger.
so he gets one for free? I don’t want Rosen to stop reporting on Mid East, but no one makes fun of sexual assault _by accident_
And thus it stands.
I suspect a great deal of the uproar over Rosen’s comments, especially from the left, comes from shock. Sure, people expect ignorant bile from the likes of Debbie Schlussel: it’s practically on message. But not Nir Rosen! He’s been one of the closest, most insightful voices on the Iraq Civil War! He’s been critical of the Bush administration and the neocon agenda for years! How could he be so insensitive?
A similar reaction unfolded when Keith Olbermann cast aspersions on the women who’ve accused Julian Assange of rape, and when rumors circulated that the Daily Show‘s writing room might not be a welcoming place for females. There was a simultaneous outbreak of (1) shocked critics and (2) panicked defenders. Oh, Jon Stewart couldn’t really be like that! It’s Jon! He’s our guy! And if Olbermann says these Swedish women are CIA stooges, then he probably knows what he’s talking about! Right?
That’s not the way it works.
Just because someone shares your ideology on one aspect – or on many aspects – doesn’t mean they share your ideology on every aspect. Pro-labor vegans can still be chauvinists. Conservative economists with a hard nose for logic can still believe in creationism or “human biodiversity.” Morrissey could be a racist; Pete Townshend could be a pedophile; Jason Mraz might be an asshole.
This is the risk you run with political labels. You subscribe to a brand, accepting all the ideals that are lumped under it. Then, you start to discover that not everyone wearing the brand feels the same way you do. This can be frustrating if it’s on an issue you find important, like whether or not women are chattel. It can be especially galling if it’s on the issue that drove you to join the brand in the first place. You speak out, but all your friends – all the other brand loyalists – defend the monsters and shame you. Don’t be such a crank, they tell you. We have to compromise in order to achieve our agenda. Politics is the art of the possible.
That’s something to think about. If you say you’re Ruling Party and the Ruling Party does something despicable, what do you do? Do you try to change the party from within? Do you shrug and swallow your bile? Do you break ranks to side with those assholes in the Opposition? Or do you tailor your beliefs – well, if they’re all voting for it, it must be a just war – this one time?
And that’s how you can tell who’s in power. The beliefs of those in power define the Party. The beliefs of those without power, the Party defines. If the pro-labor, pro-growth President drives a bill through Congress that redistributes wealth from the working poor to health insurance companies, then that must be a pro-labor position. If he fights tooth and nail for the Defense of Marriage Act, then that doesn’t mean the Ruling Party is anti-gay – it means the DOMA is pro-gay! But if a middle-tier journalist outs himself as a bitter chauvinist, only then do people have to start choosing sides.
If you’re not comfortable changing your beliefs in order to win an election, you could always drop the label. But then where would you be?
(P.S. In a related story, kudos to Sarah Jaffe at Tiger Beatdown, who has been calling out the 10 members of the Ruling Party who sponsored H.R.3 – the bill that tried to redefine rape and still puts women’s lives at risk; the bill that Change.org and MoveOn tried to lay solely at the feet of the Opposition Party. Remember, when you call the Ruling Party the “pro-choice party,” that’s a description of their tendencies, not their principles)
I haven’t entirely given up on my libertarian past, but years in Boston have definitely dragged me further left. Getting out of school has helped, too. I’d be hard pressed to say when exactly I crossed the line from “conservative libertarian” to, well, wherever I am now. The PATRIOT Act and the gradual Sovietization of a notionally free country was probably a key step. Learning that “feminism” isn’t a punchline also helped. Learning about public choice theory and economics certainly carried me along.
But if I had to pick the day I stopped trusting in capitalism to solve all ills, it’d be the day someone told me, “The marketing department’s worried that we won’t spend their entire budget this month.”
There are a lot of pundits and bloggers out there who will tell you about how free markets produce accountability, match incentives to results and eliminate wasteful spending. I can point you to them if you’re interested. But very few of them punch a clock.
People have always loved to complain about their banks. The push-button circus that passes for customer service. The larding on of fees. But the false foreclosure cases are hardly the usual complaints. These homeowners paid their mortgages — or loan modifications — on time. Some even paid off their loans. Worse, those on the receiving end of a bad foreclosure claim tell similar stories of getting bounced from one bank official to the next with no resolution while the foreclosure process continues apace.
Many have to resort to paying a lawyer, even after presenting documentation. They say they have to sue not only to stop the wrongful foreclosure but also to attempt to win back their costs.
There are no official statistics for these homeowners, but lawyers, real estate agents and consumer advocates say their ranks are growing. In November, during foreclosure hearings on Capitol Hill, senator after senator scolded the banks about wrongful foreclosures. They said their offices were deluged with complaints from people who had done everything right but were being treated by banks as if they had done everything wrong. And the Florida attorney general’s office is also investigating the issue as part of its foreclosure probe.
“This is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” says Ira Rheingold, an attorney and executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates. Diane Thompson, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, has defended hundreds of foreclosure cases. “In virtually every case, I believe the homeowner was not in default when you looked at the surrounding facts. It is a widespread problem throughout the country.”
Homeowners in Florida, Nevada, Texas and Pennsylvania have filed lawsuits alleging that they were victims of mistaken foreclosure. In many of those cases, the bank went so far as to haul away belongings and change the locks on the wrong homes.
[...]
Now the class actions are coming. In Kentucky and California, class-action lawsuits have been filed against major lenders on behalf of homeowners in loan modification programs who allege that they made all of their payments but got foreclosed on anyway.
“It is mind-boggling that these large banks accepted billions and billions of TARP money from the government, and they are just committing a fraud on the American people,” says Jack Gaitlin, who filed the Kentucky suit on Oct. 4.
(and I know I promised to stop talking about politics for two years; and I meant it at the time, really and seriously; but this was before the new TSA pat-down procedures hit the news; and a groundswell of heretofore silent civil libertarians suddenly discovered that Yes, The Federal Government Can Go Too Far In The Pursuit Of Extremists, which has only been news for two thousand years so I understand that some folks are late to the party; in any event, I think I’m allowed an exception anytime some indefensibly stupid federal policy makes headlines, and institutionalized sexual harassment definitely falls on that list)
often defined as “the art of the possible.” But that’s rather vague and doesn’t describe what actually goes on. In my eyes, “politics” is a series of unresolved debates on what exactly “consent” entails.
See, apparently, if a woman gets drunk at a bar while wearing a low-cut top, she has consented to have sex with a guy. Especially if she goes somewhere alone with him, and especially if she has a history of sleeping with guys in the past. Determining whether or not she consented is a legal – and therefore, a political – dilemma.
If a man goes to work for a large corporation, he consents that any idea developed on company time belongs to the company. Especially if he signed a piece of paper agreeing to that (among a dozen other things, like wages and sick time) and especially if every other company he might work for has the same policy. Determining whether or not he has redress if the company profits off his idea is a legal decision, and politics is the sphere of law.
If I drive a car, I consent to being pulled over by cops for any reason. If I subscribe to a magazine, I consent to the views of anyone that magazine has ever quoted. If I pay taxes, I consent to the bombing of Pakistan.
And, to make this little exercise relevant, if I board an airplane, I apparently consent to having my balls touched by a stranger.
You may agree with some of the above. But if you disagree with any of those assertions, find someone who agrees with them. They’ll invariably assert some version of the following: if you don’t like it, you don’t have to be there.
And it’s true. You don’t.
If I didn’t want my tax dollars to pay for the immolation of Pakistani wedding parties, I could always move to Costa Rica. If I didn’t want half-hour lunch breaks and forced overtime, I could always quit Wal-Mart. And if I didn’t want to be groped by a GS-12 federal LEO, I didn’t have to fly.
The mere fact that I’m present means I’ve consented. And once you consent to one item, you consent to every item that follows it.
Of course, not everyone agrees with that. Right now, there’s an outcry by American air travelers who’ve decided they don’t want to be treated like criminals every time they fly. They say they do not consent to being scanned and will opt out in large numbers to demonstrate it. Against this, the TSA cites opinion polls showing how many Americans support the scanners. So apparently consent is a tricky thing to figure out!
I always feel left out of these debates. I have this childish notion that “consent” means “I said yes to it.” Or, if we take qui tacet consentiret as our maxim – that “silence implies consent,” then consent means at the very least nothing I’ve given an explicit No to. I don’t think of consent as a subatomic particle. It’s not like a cat we have to herd into the bathtub. It should be pretty clear.
But apparently it isn’t. That’s why, every few years, there’s this big party where everyone goes into booths at their local public schools in order to determine what The American People have Consented To. If the People consented to most of the same things you consented to, congratulations! There’s a lot of cheering and sometimes crying. If the People didn’t consent to what you consented to, I’m sorry! Maybe next election! You gave a good try, though.
And apparently, at some point in the last twelve years, we consented to have our breasts squeezed. I’ll bet a lot of us would like that one back! But it’s too late now. We’ll have to wait for the next Consent Hunt in 2012.
Every nine months, I start talking about politics again. Roughly six months after that, I stop, realizing that my tone has become insufferable. As I slip further along into adulthood, I put a higher premium on being civil than on being right all the time. People can disagree with me – within earshot! – and not only will I not take it as an insult, I won’t even speak up. I don’t feel compelled to correct them. This makes me a lot more fun at parties. Smugness doesn’t keep the wine flowing.
This is my perennial promise to stop talking about politics for a bit.* One last comment to tide me over.
I spend a lot of time making fun of things in the political arena that I find contradictory. I do this because it’s easy to find contradictions and because it’s easy to turn a contradiction into a joke. That’s what paradox is and from there absurdity grows. But it’s unfair to sit in the front row, lobbing peanuts at Billy Zane while he recites Shakespeare, without saying what I would find more dignified. Nothing says critics are useless to art. But a critic must assert as well as rebut.
So here’s what I want: an immediate, dramatic increase in American cynicism.
I try not to be a Europhile, but the quality of Britain’s political satires and dramas towers over America’s. It’s not even close. Here’s a short list: House of Cards, Sandbaggers, Absolute Power, The Thick of It, Yes Minister, In The Red, and so forth. What sorts of media critical of American government written over the last twenty years that belong on that list? Wag the Dog? Maybe?
Of course, I know I am being the Europhile I try not to be. The shows I’ve cited are excellent examples of political drama, but they’re the exception, not the norm. Britain is not a nation of witty sophisticates. It’s a nation a lot like America. But when you compare the best the BBC and ITV have to offer with the best that American broadcasters have to offer, it’s not even a close race.
That’s what I’m aiming for. I want every new season of American television to have one comedy or drama depicting the savage hypocrisy of representative government. I want The Weft Wing, an Office-style mockumentary about a bunch of ambitious Harvard and Georgetown grads who figure out new euphemisms for “bombing civilians.” I want The Big Push Theory, a sitcom about four nerds who run a think tank that drafts leading opinion polls. I want Reno 911 but played straight-faced and set in Atlanta. I want Larry David’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I want stories without heroes, filled with awkward laughs and abrupt fades to black.
Why do I want all this? Because, to my cynical eyes, American politics would be easier to stomach – if not actually more humane – if Americans stopped believing politicians were better than they. They’re not. People who seek political office are no nobler, smarter or steadier than the people they govern. Picture your retired neighbor, that coworker who forwards you viral videos and the guy who sits in the deli all day and agrees loudly with talk radio. All three of them are in Congress. And more besides.
Americans claim not to be fooled. They say they’re hardened realists. But then they re-elect a guy by virtue of having been in office during a terrorist attack (which apparently means “leadership”). Or they elect a guy who sounds nice when he talks. When officials claim that they’ll lower taxes, reduce spending, bring the troops home and promote equal rights for all citizens, Americans believe them. Despite the fact that this has been promised in every election since America’s first.
A man who wants power over your tax dollars is not going to save you. He does not hold the secret to reducing unemployment. If there were a secret, we’d know it by now. That’s the thing about awesome discoveries that benefit everyone: you can’t keep them secret. Imagine if America had to hold an election every four years to rediscover penicillin.
I suspect most Americans know this or will admit it if pressed. But they still want to believe, despite a lack of empirical evidence or logical warrant, that One Man with One One-Hundredth of a Vote Over the Say of the Appointment of an Abstruse Federal Bureaucracy can make a difference.
The advantage of quality satire is that it gives the American popular culture a common language. When we encounter a ridiculous workplace situation, we can compare it to something from The Office. This makes our boorish boss, or our annoying coworkers, or our workplace bureaucracy, seem less like a trap. Most of the comedy of The Office comes from a character saying something that wouldn’t be at all out of place in a real office environment. This helps put the absurdity of our own jobs in context. “That’s right,” we remind ourselves. “This is ridiculous.” And being able to look around and admit our secret fear to our friends – that we’re participating in an absurd sham – is a relief.
People talk about disillusionment like it’s a bad thing. Who wants to stay illusioned?
Fortunately, Curtis Sittenfeld has taken the first steps, with this Swiftian bit of satire on Slate.com. After running down a laundry list of Obama’s failures within the first two years – a stimulus that wasn’t perhaps as urgent as the American public was led to believe; keeping Guantanamo Bay open; defending DADT; increasing troop presence in Afghanistan; and that’s not even counting the orders to assassinate a U.S. citizen residing in Yemen – Sittenfeld pulls back the lid on this solitaire diamond:
But when I see Obama on television, I’m unfailingly struck by his intelligence and charisma, by his easygoing humor, by the magnificence of his megawatt smile. He just makes me proud, and perhaps this is where I should admit that if there are two categories of Obama critics—conservatives who never liked the guy and have in some cases become unhinged since he was elected, and centrists or Democrats who voted for him but now feel let down—I suspect that, in the visceral nature of my response to our president, I have more in common with the unhinged nut jobs. By this I mean that my Obama admiration is a kind of emotional inverse of the right-wing Obama antipathy: I can pretend it’s all about policy, but in truth, it’s much more personal.
That’s on the second page of the article. Not since “A Modest Proposal” has a satirist buried the punchline so deep within the prose, stretching the anticipation out until it snaps with a laugh.
Brilliant satire, Sittenfeld. The rest of you: this is what we have to emulate. Get to work.
_________
* The day after everyone’s stopped campaigning in the midterm elections, Professor? Oh, how generous of you. You absolute saint.
On the spectrum of absurdity, there’s a line somewhere. For each of us this line is personal. Before that line, our reaction to the absurd is a laugh. Past that line, our reaction is a gasp.
Dark comedy works because it pushes that line, inch by inch.
In The Loop not only matches Dr. Strangelove for both the shade of its darkness and the hilarity of its comedy. It may rival Kubrick as well.
In The Loop begins with the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications, the savage Malcolm Tucker, overhearing a radio interview in which Minister for International Development Simon Foster states that war in the Middle East is “unforeseeable.” No, no, no, says Tucker – in unprintable language – this simply will not do. However, Foster’s comment is seized on by the visiting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Karen Clarke, who wants to keep the U.S. (and the U.K.) out of a Middle Eastern war. She tries to prod Foster into taking a stronger stand. Waffling, he mumbles something to reporters about how sometimes, on the road to peace, one has to “climb the mountain of conflict.”
And we’re off and running.
Add to this mix Liza Weld, a young assistant to Secretary Clarke, whose paper laying out the pros and cons of an invasion (abbreviated to “PWIP-PIP”) becomes a smoking gun on the coffee table. Add to this Toby Wright, Simon Foster’s adviser, whose craven ambition and crush on Liza lead him to several boorish choices. Add to this the Assistant Secretary of State Linton Barwick, whose bland confidence steamrolls over Clarke’s objections. Add to this James Gandolfini and Steve Coogan in hilarious cameos. Add to this a live hand grenade, a douchebag staffer with a squash racket, a Scottish press officer with a penchant for Trainspotting-level brutality, and the world’s most awkward UN conference. And a teetering stone wall.
In The Loop blends half a dozen plotlines, over a dozen major speaking roles and several key MacGuffins into a 110-minute runtime. It bounces between London, Northampshire, Washington and New York City. Characters are openly savage to each other, whether in the bland sarcasm of the States or the frothing profanity of the Kingdom, despite being nominal coworkers. And yet you never lose track of what’s at stake. You never get confused as to who means what to whom. And you never stop laughing.
Dr. Strangelove is the perfect dark comedy because it suggests that the world could be brought to an end because of two poor decisions – Attack Plan R and the Doomsday Device – and the institutional miscues that protect them. And because it was hilarious. Where In The Loop matches it, and just maybe exceeds it, is in suggesting that the world can be brought to war because of a series of poor decisions. With In The Loop, there is no inept Captain Mandrake, nor any stern President Muffley, trying to save the world from chaos. Everyone is equally mercenary. There is no President Bartlett waiting to save us.
In The Loop is not a story of heroes defeated by their own flaws. There are no heroes. In the grim darkness of our not-too-distant past, there is only war.
Bob Adriano: In the meeting with the Foreign Office, the committee was accidentally and briefly alluded to. Linton Barwick: Which committee? Bob Adriano: The … the war committee, sir. Linton Barwick: All right, Karen is not to know about this, huh? She is an excitable, yapping she-dog. Get a hold of those minutes. I have to correct the record. Bob Adriano: We can do that? Linton Barwick: Yes, we can. Those minutes are an aide-memoire for us. They should not be a reductive record of what happened to have been said, but they should be more a full record of what was intended to have been said. I think that’s the more accurate version, don’t you?
A few weeks ago, I got a mailer offering me a nice discount on any purchases from the New Hampshire Liquor and Wine Outlet. For those of you not from New England: the Outlet is the only chain of stores where hard liquor or wine may be sold in New Hampshire. Since New Hampshire has no sales tax, the discount on the final price, compounded with the savings on this coupon, more than paid for the trip. So Sylvia and I drove up to Derry on Saturday afternoon, taking in the gorgeous fall foliage on the way. I loaded up my cart with several massive bottles of mid-tier liquor – Tanqueray, Canadian Club, Smirnoff – and paid a mere pittance. A trifle, for the joy they’ll bring.
Jaunts like this remind me of why I’m not comfortable identifying with either of the major political mindsets in America – either conservative or liberal.
Conservatives tend to champion the “rule of law” as if it’s a value in and of itself. “Sure, the illegal immigrants in the Midwest aren’t committing crimes in record numbers,” they say, “but their very existence in the States is a crime.” Or consider Rudy Giuliani’s “broken windows” crackdown in New York City in the 90s. The idea seems to be that an environment of widespread lawlessness encourages greater crime. The problem – outside from a lack of empirical evidence in either Arizona or Manhattan – is that we’re all lawbreakers. We all scoff at the laws we find inconvenient and adhere to the laws we like, or the laws we can’t get away with breaking.
The relationship between New Hampshire and Massachusetts is a perfect example. There’s a long-established trend of Massachusetts residents motoring up north to buy wholesale clothing, cartons of cigarettes and liquor in New Hampshire. This trend is so well-known that massive corporations cater to this sort of thing, as American Express did when they sent me that discount mailer. The coupon rang up on the register as “AMEX MASS.” Now, there’s nothing illegal about a Massachusetts resident buying liquor in New Hampshire – provided he reports it at the end of the year and pays his use tax. Which I promise you, I am definitely going to pay come April 2011. You just see if I don’t.
But I know not everyone else abides the law as closely. So you’ve got an endemic, multi-generational culture of tax frauds in eastern Massachusetts. Has this driven up the crime rate in Boston? Does this make the North Shore a greater source of other forms of tax evasion than typical for the country? Because, if not, I think we need to reconsider the “culture of scofflaws” idea.
On the left side of the aisle comes the notion of the tax burden in the first place. Whenever I get into an argument over the justification of taxes, I’m told that they’re a “payment for services rendered” by the state and federal government. The same way I might pay two dollars for a gallon of milk, or a thousand for a computer, I pay the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the U.S. Treasury several thousand dollars a year in exchange for bank bailouts, secret prisons in Afghanistan and ConAgra subsidies. Which I suppose makes sense.
I can understand the reasoning that taxes are money that I owe to the government (even if I’m not sure I buy it). But I can’t understand the reasoning that taxes are money of mine that the government already owns. And if you think I’m exaggerating, consider this Huffington Post article, about a series of tax loopholes that “cost the U.S. $60 billion a year” (the headline’s words, not mine).
The author’s mindset seems to be that Google doesn’t owe the U.S. money – rather, that Google was holding money that already belonged to the U.S. and hasn’t returned it fast enough. It’s the distinction between “I promised to buy you a six-pack” and “you put your six-pack in my fridge; let me get it for you.” I understand the former, but not the latter, especially if I bought the bespoke six-pack.
Google, Microsoft and the other companies who employ the “Double Irish” strategy aren’t breaking the law. They are taking advantage of loopholes in corporate tax law. You might consider that sort of behavior uncivic, if you think that people have an obligation to maximize their tax burden. But no actual human thinks that way. In fact, 100 out of 100 people I talk to think the opposite – that if you find a way to lower your tax burden, whether it’s through charitable donations or investment strategies or setting up a trust for your child’s education, you go for it. And you can see that sort of mindset in the New Hampshire Liquor and Wine Outlet, which advertises to Massachusetts residents to come thumb their nose at the law.
If you think I’m misunderstanding or caricaturing your view, let me know. I’d be happy to discuss it with you over a glass of illegal booze.
