Nonfiction Political Conversations

(c) by Mark Dempsey

You Yanks don't consult the wisdom of democracy; you enable mobs -- Australian planner

In a political conversation, Sacramento County Supervisor Sue Frost's husband Jack said "What the Republican Party needs is better marketing." Jack Frost--and no, I didn't make up that name--sits on the County's Republican Central Committee, so he speaks for the professionals. In fairness, the other major party would say the same thing. Democrat Boss Tweed declared "I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates." Marketing and monopoly together!

As Jack declared his allegiance to marketing, I thought: "Yeah, Jack, we need a different shade of lipstick on those pigs." The truth is that many of the major parties' public policies are so repugnant, they must be disguised. The "Overton window" of respectable public policy options leans toward the money, too.

Later, in the same conversation, Jack said "I'm regretful the Republican Party hasn't done more to decrease the national debt." This demonstrated the kind of marketing he had been talking about. The "regret" is Jack reaching across the aisle, humbling himself, saying, in effect "Hey, I've made mistakes too, won't you at least meet me halfway and agree we need to reduce the debt?

The US has had significant debt reductions seven times in its history. Every time, the reduction is followed by a wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures--a Great Depression after the Coolidge and Hoover administrations ratcheted down the national debt, for one example. When Democrat Andrew Jackson paid the debt off completely, that eliminated public currency, and people had do do their business with specie (gold) and roughly 7,000 varieties of private banknotes of varying reliability--a business nightmare. The Panic of 1837 (another Great Depression) followed.

Still, Jack's statement was astonishing. In percentage terms, the current leader for increases in national debt is Republican "saint," Ronald Reagan. Reagan cut taxes on the wealthy roughly in half making a huge deficit--and, with his successor, increased payroll taxes eightfold. Reagan's deficit was larger than the sum of all previous administrations' deficits. Dick Cheney said "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." For his trouble, Reagan did get an average business cycle recovery, not the marketing declaration that it was "Morning in America"--which is what the Wall St. Journal reported.

Yet Jack wants to reduce national debt?! No, not by increasing taxes--the way the Clinton administration did it--that's against the Republican religion. So we must decrease federal spending--that is the real message.

OK, fair enough. Federal spending is not always optimal. Yet eighty-five percent of that spending is on only three things: the military, Social Security, and Medicare. The idea that Jack wanted to cut military spending is too ridiculous to entertain. Sure, US military spending is three times more than the Chinese spend and 10 times more than the Russians, but both parties in Congress still pass military budgets bigger than the Pentagon requests and rejects any attempt to cut that spending. We can never be safe enough!

Jack's wife, Sacramento County Supervisor Sue Frost, reminds us with her every public utterance that we do not have enough police. She's voted to expand the jail, even though the US incarcerates at five times the world's per-capita average. We can never spend too much on "defense," or be too safe in the Frosts' world.

But wait, there's more! People believe national debt is something owed by taxpayers to anonymous bondholders, or Chinese exporters. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Since the government is the monopoly provider of the dollars needed to pay taxes, it must spend first, before any tax revenue, then retrieve dollars in taxes. What do we call the dollars not retrieved in taxes, you know, the ones in your wallet or bank account? Those are the dollar financial assets of the population. Perhaps not so obviously, they also are equally national debt. This is analogous to your bank account, which is your asset, but the bank's liability. The bank owes you the money. For your dollars, the government owes you relief from an inevitable liability--taxes. This isn't exotic economics, it's double-entry bookkeeping.

So what Jack really wants is an impoverished population, with diminished Social Security, Medicare, and diminished savings. This desire flies in the face of a few facts about the economic state of the American public. Forty percent of the population can't handle a $400 emergency, 58% live paycheck-to-paycheck and 65% of seniors have only Social Security and Medicare to fund their retirement.

So why would anyone want to impoverish the public at large (by reducing national "debt")? The answer is that doing so enables vulture capitalists to pick up assets on the cheap when people are desperate. Desperation also means employers can squeeze their employees who simply must have the job. And, unfortunately, desperation also means more people turn to crime.

The U.S. has a half million medical bankruptcies annually, but thanks to their version of Medicare, Canadians have none. No Canadian needs to start cooking meth to pay their spouse's hospital bill (the plot of Netflix' Breaking Bad). And yes, Breaking Bad is fiction, but it's not much of a stretch to believe that many people turn to crime because of poverty. As Anatole France once said, the law, in its magnificent equality, forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the street, and stealing bread.

But hey! Sue got her way, and Sacramento's Supervisors voted to spend nearly a half billion dollars enlarging the jail. This won't solve our crime problem, but it is great marketing...