Why were the Dems so ineffective in stopping the Bush tax cuts?

Great Debates
121

Oh dear…if you really think these are the biggest 3 pressure groups in Washington, you are living in a completely different reality than me. :wink: Seriously though, yes it is true that all levels are vulnerable to pressure. However, this sort of playing one state (or locality) off the other thing…essentially putting states in competition with each other for corporate dollars…is a unique consequence of devolving power down to lower levels. (As I pointed out, the other track being pursued by the powers-that-be is unfettered free trade agreements that allow them to extend this competition to a nation vs. nation level.)

Of course, another issue we haven’t even begun to address is efficiency…i.e., there are some things that it just seems wasteful to duplicate in all 50 states when they can be handled more efficiently at the federal level. This devolving of such things to the states must be brought to us by the same people who brought us the horrendous bureaucracy of our current health insurance system! Well, at least it employs lots of people to push insurance forms around!

In the end though, I still feel that all this talk about federal government this vs. state government that, without making any attempt to consider the other power players in the situation is one big gigantic smokescreen! When the history of our nation in this era is written, I think historians will marvel at the extent to which people were made to see the government as this evil ogre controlling their lives when, in fact, their lives were much more in the control of other powers. While I am not particularly enamored of those who have managed to so effectively set up this smokescreen, I must admit to a certain amount of awed respect for their success in accomplishing this…The whole nature of this debate is a testament to their success!

I did? I think you mean Sam Stone here?

122

Goodness. Your post was so long I missed this the first time around. No offense, I try to read what everyone writes, and I like a good debate as much as anyone, but some of these super long posts are getting me to the MEGO point.

Kimstu, you are right, but for the wrong reason. The analogy is flawed because a restaurant will bill you according to what you eat there. The gov does not tax us according to how much we use it’s services.

The analogy can be rendered less flawed by adding language to the effect that the restaurant billed them not for what they ate, but by how much money they made, and fed them not what they paid for, but according to who claimed to be hungrier.

I note you did not respond to any of my other points.

123

Actually, the analogy would be improved by positing an agent of the restaurant who collects a cover charge at the door, the amount of which is predicated on the income of each prospective customer. Some are charged a relatively high cover charge, some are charged little or nothing, and some are even handed a little cash by the doorman. The cover charge only subsidizes the upkeep and management of the restaurant, keeping the prices of the meals down, since overhead doesn’t need to be reflected on the bill. Once inside, each patron buys whatever he can then afford with the cash he has. The customers who arrived at the door with the most money still have the means to purchase fairly lavish meals. The schlepps who got the rebate can have their choice of many of the appetizers and some of the side dishes. And of course, the water is free.

Aren’t analogies fun? -The simpler ones are piss-poor at accuracy, but they sure can be used to inflate one side of a complex argument, can’t they?

124

Heck yeah. Imagine never being able to use one. You also need facts and statistics, of course, but those things alone won’t move people.

I’m not religious or anything, but props to Jesus and his parables.

No, not really. The government provides it’s services to us (“meals”) either equally to everybody (national defense) or else only to people who can’t afford to pay taxes(“cover charge”)(welfare, food stamps, etc.) The wealthier citizens (“customers”) aren’t able to buy anything more lavish from the government (“restaurant”). What “meals” the government is serving it is serving to those “schlepps” you mentioned. Everyone else has to dine elsewhere.

Your improvement isn’t.

I note the curious fact that while you seem to disdain the use of analogy in arguments, it was my analogy to which you chose to respond.

125

I don’t disdain the use of analogy in arguments. I use 'em all the time. I understand and appreciate analogies, and have been known to throw down at the drop of a hat. However, unlike you and Mr. Buckley, I disdain the use of inapt analogies to press a particular p.o.v. on a complex issue.

Buckley’s analogy is cynical and shows disdain not only for the truth but for the mental acuity his audience. It would hold relevance only if the government supplied all goods and services purchased by the American taxpayer. However, if you believe the minimum wage worker struggling to stay on the good side of the poverty line has an equal standard of living to the “overtaxed” corporate exec, then I guess I can see why you’d agree with Buckley. :rolleyes:

126

I have a question for you federalists here - this is a question that George Will asked this morning on “This Week”:

Just what things should the Federal government NOT be involved in? Where would you draw the line? Is there any hard and fast principle that guides your notion of the separation of power? Or is it anything goes?

As Will mentioned, this week a bill was introduced in the Senate that seeks to force schools to remove pop machines. Of course, the Senator who introduced this is from a big dairy producing state, and the pop machines compete with milk sales in the school. Of course, he’s wrapping the debate around the ‘good of the children’.

Should the federal government be deciding whether or not little Johnny’s school should have a pop machine in it? If so, are there any issues too small or too local to avoid federal involvement?

127

Excuse me…What country are you living in? If you want to see what the wealthier citizens are capable of buying from the government in the country I live in, you might want to check out http://www.billionairesforbushorgore.com/. See in particular http://www.billionairesforbushorgore.com/analysis/returnoninvestment.html.

By the way, good luck in trying to figure out how much each person uses in government services and thus how much each should pay if they are to put in as much as they get out! I don’t know of anybody who has been able to do a very credible job of such a calculation.

128

SS: *Just what things should the Federal government NOT be involved in? Where would you draw the line? Is there any hard and fast principle that guides your notion of the separation of power? Or is it anything goes? *

(Just a usage note: in the US, the phrase “separation of powers” typically refers to the divisions among the three branches of government—legislative, executive, judicial—rather than to separation at different levels of government. I’m not sure what phrase we should use to refer to that second type of separation, but I think “separation of power” is potentially misleading.) Sure, there are many specific issues that the federal government should not be involved in, and school soda pop machines sounds like a shining example of such an issue. (There are, of course, oodles of similar examples of micromanaging legislation written solely or primarily as political pork.) Mind you, I’m not saying I’m thrilled about schools shilling for soda companies, and if there turned out to be a significant health or safety issue involved (some sort of horrible effects of caffeine on growing children, for example), I’d say the federal government definitely has a role to play in regulating such decisions. But as things are? Nuh-uh.

However, when you ask for a “hard and fast principle” that will enable us to “draw a line” definitively between the sorts of things the federal government should be involved in and the sorts it should not, I think you may be out of luck. After all, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says very clearly that “The Congress shall have power […] to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States […] [and] to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by the Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.” That is an extraordinarily broad empowerment of the federal government to “provide for the general welfare of the United States” and to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper” to that end, with few or no official restrictions on what Congress is Constitutionally allowed to poke its nose into.

I personally think it would be folly, not to mention a real time-waster, to attempt to assign all the myriad aspects of public life firmly to one governmental sphere or another, or to try to formulate some abstract principle that could tell us unambiguously whether any particular issue ought to be exclusively federal or exclusively state or exclusively local or some weighted combination of the above. No, the federal government shouldn’t be involved in everything, but no, there’s no truly useful way to decide exactly which things it should be involved in except on a case-by-case basis. Yup, that means that in many cases Congress will screw up and start meddling with things that would be more effectively handled in other ways (or, conversely, fail to get involved in issues that it could handle more effectively than the states do). Unfortunately, as I said, I don’t think there exists any “general principle” of allocation of issues among the various levels of government that can effectively prevent that.

129

There are many good reasons for favoring a srong central govrernment with broad powers, but the Constitution isn’t one of them After all, the 9th and 10th amendments say.

The tenth amendment says that the federal government has only those powers specifically delegated to them by the constitution. The 9th amendment says any left-over rights are retained by the people. For historical reasons, we don’t operate that way any more. You can argue that we’re better off with fewer individual rights and a more powerful central government. But, a fair reading of the Constitution can’t be the basis for justifying today’s broad federal power.

130

I was re-reading and noticed a couple of questions of yours that I missed:

Can you amplifiy what kinds of complex systems you mean?

(This was apropos of my comment that increasing the size and complexity of systems doesn’t necessarily mean increasing their rigidity.) For example, the laws of physical science have become vastly more complex since Aristotle’s day—ask jshore if there exists a physicist who understands any more even of his/her own particular subfield than lawyers do of theirs—yet the system as a whole is much less restrictive to human potential than it was when it was simpler, because we understand more of its ramifications. A system of natural laws is not the same as a system of human laws, of course, but it’s equally true that a smaller system is not necessarily less restrictive than a larger one. Consider the various theocracies and autocracies that have operated with much smaller and simpler bodies of law than our own vast network of legal regulation, but which were nonetheless a hell of a lot less free for the average individual governed by them.

This, among other reasons, is why I think that alarmist assumptions that “more regulation” automatically equals “less freedom” are suspect, and should be examined carefully. We always have to look at the details of whose freedoms the regulation affects, and in what ways. For example, anti-discrimination laws decrease the freedom of employers to refuse to hire somebody simply on the grounds of race/gender/sexual orientation/whatever prejudice. But they increase the freedom of members of the discriminated-against group in their employment choices. The oversimplistic “more laws = less freedom” equation just isn’t adequate to evaluate such trade-offs.

E.g., a big part of the Savings and Loan problem came from a scummy Rhode Island Congressman who got laws passed for the benefit of certain S&L crooks. Anyone remember his name? IIRC it begins with a G

Do you mean Fernand St. Germain?

131

december: The tenth amendment says that the federal government has only those powers specifically delegated to them by the constitution. The 9th amendment says any left-over rights are retained by the people. For historical reasons, we don’t operate that way any more.

?? On what evidence do you base your claim that the powers “delegated to the United States by the Constitution” do not include, as I said, a broadly construed power “to provide for the general welfare of the United States” which, after all, is sitting there right smack dab in the middle of the Constitution? For heaven’s sake, if the Tenth Amendment really meant that Congress had absolutely no business regulating anything but roads, patents, the military, and the other particular tasks specifically mentioned in Article I, huge amounts of federal law from the eighteenth century to the present would be actually unconstitutional. If that’s what you’re arguing, I think you’ve departed far enough from the current consensus of legal opinion to make it impossible to debate this issue with you in practical terms.

And the Ninth Amendment seems equally irrelevant to this issue, since it simply refers to the existence of certain unenumerated individual rights. The mere existence of federal regulation, even broad federal regulation with strong centralized power, does not necessarily constitute an infringement of individual rights. (Or again, if you’re arguing that it does, that is IMHO such a radical stance that we probably have no further common ground of realistic debate.)

132

Yup, that’s what I’m arguing. I have trouble believing your shocked reaction. Surely this isn’t the first time you have ever encountered this idea.

IIRC there was a major controversy during the time of FDR, which led the Supreme Court to broaden the powers of the federal government. However IANAL so I can’t pursue this argument. Can any of you lawyers help me. Or, can any of you tell Kimstu that I’m full of it.

As I said, it may well be a good thing that the federal government is not as limited as the Constitution called for. But IMHO we there by strained SC decisions, which dramatically changed the meaning of the document.

:rolleyes: No, dear. The laws of physical science are identical to what they were in Arstotle’s day. Scientist’s understand these laws much better now than then, which does indeed produce less rigidity. However, the man-made laws in America today are far more complex than they were 200 years ago, and are much less underst ood, which produces less freedom.

Yes, that’s the one. Thanks for remembering.

133

december: *"[…] if the Tenth Amendment really meant that Congress had absolutely no business regulating anything but roads, patents, the military, and the other particular tasks specifically mentioned in Article I, huge amounts of federal law from the eighteenth century to the present would be actually unconstitutional. If that’s what you’re arguing, I think you’ve departed far enough from the current consensus of legal opinion to make it impossible to debate this issue with you in practical terms."

Yup, that’s what I’m arguing. I have trouble believing your shocked reaction. Surely this isn’t the first time you have ever encountered this idea.*

Well, I’m familiar with the fact that the scope of the federal government broadened considerably during the New Deal. But I haven’t previously encountered the conclusion that federal laws affecting issues outside the scope of the ones specifically mentioned in Article I are actually unconstitutional, and I still think it sounds pretty divorced from practical legal reality.

As I said, it may well be a good thing that the federal government is not as limited as the Constitution called for. But IMHO we there by strained SC decisions, which dramatically changed the meaning of the document.

Oh, well, if all you’re saying is that constitutional interpretations have changed over time, I have no quarrel with that. I thought that you meant “unconstitutional” the way that lawyers seem to mean it, as in “incompatible with the Constitution and requiring to be struck down.” But you seem to be saying that the current broad interpretation of the powers granted to the federal government by the Constitution is not unconstitutional in that sense. So I don’t see why you object to my using it in explaining to Sam Stone that the Constitution vests the federal government with a very broad and general power to “provide for the general welfare.”

*“For example, the laws of physical science have become vastly more complex since Aristotle’s day—ask jshore if there exists a physicist who understands any more even of his/her own particular subfield than lawyers do of theirs—yet the system as a whole is much less restrictive to human potential than it was when it was simpler, because we understand more of its ramifications. A system of natural laws is not the same as a system of human laws, of course, but it’s equally true that a smaller system is not necessarily less restrictive than a larger one.”

:rolleyes: No, dear. The laws of physical science are identical to what they were in Arstotle’s day.*

'Scuse my ambiguity—as a historian of science IRL, I tend to speak of “the laws of science” as referring to the descriptive constructs we humans create and use rather than the underlying phenomena they describe. By that usage, we have indeed had several different sets of scientific laws, but I didn’t mean to imply that I think the phenomena they describe have changed.

However, the man-made laws in America today are far more complex than they were 200 years ago, and are much less understood, which produces less freedom.

I repeat, though, that no one scientist understands all our current scientific “laws” any more than any one lawyer understands our current legal system. Evidently, some complex systems can continue to operate very effectively even if no one individual can understand more than a little piece of them. So I still don’t see what there is to be upset about in the bare fact that no one individual can understand all of federal law.

As for your reiteration that “more complex laws = less freedom”, it ignores my point that increased legal regulation can actually produce an increase in freedom, as in my example of anti-discrimination laws.

Now, if you’re defining “freedom” just to mean “freedom from legal regulation”, well then of course more complex laws always produce less freedom, tautologically. But I think that that’s unacceptably limiting the meaning of the word “freedom”. To say that “freedom” is measured exclusively by how free you are from legal interference is, as I said before, just way too simplistic when you’re talking about the whole scope of freedoms that are important to people. Plenty of things besides legal regulation interfere with one’s actual level of freedom, and to the extent that additional laws place restraints on those interferences, they increase one’s freedom rather than decreasing it.

134

And how exactly do you figure that? Mind you, that seemed to be exactly what you were positing in your “improvement”.

You are conflating two different issues here jshore. On the one hand, there is the tax system, and on the other, what we generally call corporate welfare (special tax breaks and/or subsidies for profit-making businesses). Please be advised that I am strongly opposed to corporate welfare, but I think the proper way to deal with it is to get rid of it, not fiddle with the tax code even more.