Education needs more support and emphasis, and so does policy

 Before taking this class, I had almost no interest in advocacy and the idea kind of annoyed me, even though I knew it would be important for me to advocate for my future clients. Since being involved in the class this semester, I have started to develop a deeper understanding and interest in advocacy related topics. For one, I am looking forward to attending the advocacy day at the capital. I think it will be a great look into advocacy in action. This course has challenged me to keep updated on current events and to know what is happening in policy. Growing up, I have been so used to completely ignoring anything political going on, since it did not directly pertain to me. 

Another thing that is interesting to me about policy is how if you look under the initial statement or claim that the press, media, or government make, there is usually something deeper going on underneath. In class we talked about Trump’s idea to give drug dealers the death penalty, and how his staff and colleagues sort of supported him in that, using guarded language. But, the reality behind that was that the law does not allow the death penalty for drug dealers who do not kill anyone. 

Education policies are also something that interest me greatly. When I started college I was an education major, and a big reason why I left that major was because I couldn’t stand the laws and government influence in the system. I decided I would much rather help people on an individual level than have to deal with common core and school budget cuts. I have seen recently in the news and on Facebook a lot about teachers with run down classrooms that are falling apart. These teachers complain that they do not have supply budgets and have to spend their own money on copy paper in order to print off worksheets for their students. Teachers believe they shouldn’t have to worry about their budget crisis and should be focused on their students, and I have to agree. I think it is interesting and frustrating how we discuss in class how much of the United States budget is spent on the military. Even a small fraction of that budget would significantly help the education system in the United States. I am hoping that after all this uproar on social media, we start to see some better education policies written. 

Yes, state and federal budgets are moral documents. They represents what we think is important.  It’s true that state taxes such as sales and property taxes don’t fund the military, and none of the payroll taxes fund the military, but when it comes to the Federal Income Tax, about half of that is going to national defense, or, if you prefer the term Karl Marx used: “The Human Slaughter Industry.”  Obviously we need some national defense spending and we need some persons to serve in the armed forces, and there are many noble and good persons in the military, but it is discouraging to read about American rockets and bombs killing innocent people in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and so forth, and likewise disheartening to read about the huge profits made by companies that produce and sell such weapons and encourage their use, or sell over-priced and low-quality equipment and material to the armed forces; meanwhile, as you point out, we have not invested adequately in schools.  And, the media and our pervasive paranoid culture remain fascinated with “welfare cheats” and people who “abuse the system” by getting a few hundred dollars per month of food or rent subsidies that someone begrudges them.  Meanwhile, we give contracts to timber and mining and ranching interests to pay the public mere pennies on the dollar for the resources they take from our commons (public land); we continue to subsidize unsustainable and unethical industrial farming, destructive fossil fuel consumption, and the prison-security industrial complex.  Yet in the testimony about investing a few hundred thousand dollars to help young adults who have aged out of foster care to go to four-year colleges, many state representatives apologized (apparently sincerely) that there was “no money left” [sic] to fund such extravagances. 

Humans brutalized by the system that squeezes them into conformist roles in making other people wealthy while supporting a parasitic leisure class of “creators” whose main contribution to society is raiding companies and stripping them of value and putting their workers into unemployment are shielded from the truth, and their wounds and disappointments and stresses make some of them susceptible to sadistic fantasies of “killing the brutes” (whether fantasizing about running your car over a Black Lives Matters protestor or actually committing genocide against plantation workers in the Belgian Congo, Europeans and European-Americans have an enduring ability to turn their own pain into the infliction of misery on others). The imagined spectacle of executions of drug dealers, or the heartless deportation of Americans who happened to be born abroad and arrive here as small children, or the the imposition of long prison sentences on poor persons who commit petty crimes (20 years incarceration a potential sentence for trafficking your SNAP benefits)—these are the fantasies of a people who are corrupted by an immoral system of exploitation and false competitive struggle. The work of our profession to change the culture and change the debate and encourage new priorities and more effective solutions to social problems is daunting but absolutely necessary. 

The struggle to get people to see how immoral and inefficient and wasteful our current priorities and policies are is one that can be so challenging that we can get discouraged. But, it is not a hopeless struggle, and sometimes there are successes.

[The “killing the brutes” phrase is a reference to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, in which the insane Kurtz adds the phrase “exterminate all the brutes” to a report he has submitted to a group intent on the suppression of savage customs.  And, if you read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost you will know that the Belgian administration in the Congo did kill millions of Africans, just as the fictional Kurtz recommended. My point is that people go mad in extreme conditions, and it is madness to fantasize about killing nonviolent protestors, just as it is madness to tolerate policies that kill innocent people, like a health care system that lets people die if they don’t have the money to pay for life-saving medicines or procedures that society could easily afford to provide, or a “defense” system that routinely kills innocent people thousands of miles away from us who are minding their own business and have no animosity toward us until our bombs (or the bombs of our so-called “friends”) smash up their homes and break the bodies of their friends and family.]

Income Taxes as a Fine for Being Useful

A former graduate student of mine; a very generous and friendly former student whom I greatly admire and with whom I've remained in contact for about a decade now since he graduated, recently posted a meme photo image of an Uncle Sam with the words: "Income Taxes are the Fine One Pays For the Crime of Being Useful and Productive".   I admit it's a cute meme, and there is some truth to it, in a broadly understood context. Yes, it’s logically true that producers contribute to the public good, and those who don't produce can't contribute as much or in the same way because they haven't produced anything to contribute, and for humorous effect, we can call "contributions to the public good" a “fine” (a punishment) we must suffer for doing the right thing.  Phrasing it this way is funny.  I get it.

But, some people might take the humorous idea of the meme seriously and allow it to reinforce some general misconceptions about how people contribute to the public good.  I therefore responded with this:

Income taxes are what one pays to sustain public goods, like education, roads, airports, national defense, space exploration, housing for the homeless and poor, food assistance to the poor and hungry, medical research (NIH and CDC), public lands management, enforcement of clean air and clean water.

The responses and my final response were interesting:

One person wrote (quite aptly, I think) in response to my observation:
Tell that to Springfield, think they forgot.

My old student wrote a thoughtful question:
So we had no roads or education, national defense or assistance for the poor, prior to 1913? Wonder how people ever got by.

Another person posted something that got me thinking about how people perceive taxes and government spending:
Income Taxes may well have started out as a means to fund some of those things but today it is simply wealth redistribution.

And then my former student re-introduced some humor to the proceedings:
And extortion

Well, even though I think they are sort of joking, we now have a claim that income taxes are “simply wealth redistribution” and also “extortion” and I felt the need to respond, so here was my reply:

Are you open to learning something about taxes and federal spending? The biggest things that the government spends money on are: Social Security; Medicaid; Medicare; and National Defense. Social Security is paid for with the payroll taxes, which cover all but $200 billion, and that gap is covered by taking money out of the Trust Fund (for Social Security). Medicare is the next biggest spending item, and it's covered by premiums and the Medicare payroll taxes, and some money taken from the Medicare Trust Fund. So, Medicare and Social Security (which account for 39¢ of every $1 spent by the government) don't rely on income taxes. Income taxes go to the other 61¢ of every $1 spent. This is split into: 
1) Medicaid and health services (about 12¢); 
2) National Defense (about 16¢); 
3) interest on the national debt (11¢) and 
4) everything else (22¢). 

Medicaid is redistributive: it pays for medical care for poor persons who would otherwise simply remain sick or die or else get charity care (if available). People who can afford to pay are going to get hit with some of these costs anyway: if we didn't have Medicaid, many doctors and hospitals would feel ethically obliged to care for the sick who couldn't pay (the alternative of allowing them to suffer or die is generally contradicted by the teachings of Christianity, for example), and medical care charities would be more aggressive in fund-raising. The costs would be shifted (by health care providers and medical charities) to paying customers and those who were more benevolent and willing to be philanthropic. Medicaid simply distributes the burden to all of us taxpayers, so that the more benevolent don't end up carrying the cost while the stingy get away as free riders, and medical costs for the rest of us remain more affordable (because we are paying income taxes which support Medicaid so that our health care providers don't have to increase the costs they charge us in order to cover their costs of providing care which wouldn't be paid for without Medicaid). 

Defense is also redistributive (all government spending is). Our money goes to pay warriors, people who build things for our military, and so forth. It's essentially a way to provide jobs for engineers and soldiers and everyone who takes care of military equipment, builds military equipment, provides services to the military, and so forth. I would rather that we redistributed more money to people who are doing medical research, who are more likely to improve my quality of life and delay my death, and less money to the military, but that's evidently a fringe opinion. 

Interest on the national debt is redistributing money to people who hold U.S. Debt. That includes most people who have mutual fund investments, where a certain percentage of assets are usually in the safe U.S. Treasury investments. 
As for "everything else", (the 22¢ of every $1 spent by the government that isn't Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, or Defense), it's a mixed bag of policies that redistribute money to the poor and policies that distribute money to prison guards, and research scientists, and people who build and maintain roads and ports and airports, and safety inspectors, and Census Bureau demographers, and FBI agents, and so forth. All of this is stuff that taxpayers evidently want done, since their elected representatives have voted for such things. 

As for the redistribution toward the poor, who are usually poor because they are disabled or chronically sick or mentally or cognitively impaired, or are children of adults who are unable to find and keep high-paying jobs, 11.3¢ of every $1 spent by the federal government go to things like school lunches, supplemental nutritional assistance, housing vouchers, public housing, unemployment compensation (which is paid for by payroll taxes paid by employers for the most part rather than income taxes), international development and humanitarian assistance, social services in education, community and regional development grants, etc.). About 3¢ of the remaining 10.7¢ goes to Veteran benefits and services, leaving about 7.7¢ for all the other discretionary outlays, like the budgets of the Department of Education, Department of Transportation, Department of Justice, the Census, NASA, the NIH and CDC, Disaster relief, Homeland Security, the State Department, and so forth. 

The opinion that "it's mostly redistributive" is correct in the sense that all government spending is redistributive. The money paid in taxes goes out as benefits, wages, subsidies, or prices paid to workers, military personnel, retired persons, health care providers, children, and poor persons. But, the idea that most of the income taxes are redistributed to poor persons isn't really based on actual spending. Medicaid and all the other spending that goes to poor persons (actually it goes to the people who provide housing, food, and health services to poor persons for the most part, as the poor quickly spend the money they receive on keeping themselves from starving, becoming homeless, or dying or remaining sick) accounts for about 23.3¢ of every federal dollar spent, whereas all other spending that isn't covered by payroll taxes and trust funds amounts to about 37.7¢ (for defense, interest on the national debt, and other things that don't especially target the poor). 

As for it being extortion. This is stretching the meaning of "extortion". Yes, if you are a citizen and you live in a society and you refuse to contribute to the society in an amount determined by an assembly of representatives who were elected by you and your peers, you can be fined, or even jailed, so there is certainly coercive power involved. But, if you can afford a passport and a ticket to a low-tax or no income-tax society, you can always relocate yourself to the Cayman Islands or Somalia or Saudi Arabia or whatever alternative society without income taxes appeals to you more than this one. Income taxes (and government spending) are much lower in Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and the standard of living in those societies is pretty good, and in Taiwan and South Korea you would be about as free as you are in the USA. It's possible to build a fairly decent society with lower taxes. But even those societies use coercive power to take money from residents and citizens as contributions toward maintaining the common good (like defending from invasions threatened by North Korea and China, providing universal health care insurance, providing very modest retirement pensions, and so forth).

We had large taxes on certain goods before the income tax. Alcohol, for example, was heavily taxed. Before 1913 our ancestors' consumption of beer and whisky covered many government expenditures. Also, without the stabilizing influence of a public welfare and pension system, we had dramatic economic swings, with crashes and panics afflicting our economy every 3-5 years, during which the economy contracted by levels unimaginable by today's standards. The early 1890s and the 1930s were far, far worse than the Great Recession of 2008.

Military Spending in proposed FY 2012 budget

The President says we can find some savings in our military spending.  Let's take a look at the White House proposed FY 2012 spending related to defense:

43.2	Billion for the Department of Homeland Security
553	Billion for the base budget of the Department of Defense (War Department)
11	Billion I estimate is given to the (classified) National Intelligence Program budget.
114.7	Billion for military activity in Afghanistan and Iraq (excluding Department of State spending in these areas of the “Overseas Contingency Operations”)
61.8	Billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs
11.8	Billion to the Department of Energy for “Nation’s Nuclear Weapons Arsenal”
795.5	Total spending related to military and security from foreign threats included in proposed FY 2012 White House budget

Yes, with nearly 800 billion spent on protecting us from foreign threats, it does seem likely to me that we could reduce this spending.  Here is my proposed military budget:

36	Billion for the Department of Homeland Security
450	Billion for the base budget of the Department of Defense (War Department)
11	Billion I would give give to the (classified) National Intelligence Program budget.
40	Billion for military activity in Afghanistan and Iraq (excluding Department of State spending in these areas of the “Overseas Contingency Operations”).  I'd be getting us out of Afghanistan much sooner. Put 10 billion of the savings into foreign aid type intervention in Afghanistan.
65	Billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs (increase their budget and do more for the health of our veterans)
8	Billion to the Department of Energy for “Nation’s Nuclear Weapons Arsenal.” I'd spend much of this money to get rid of such weapons.
610	Total spending related to military and security from foreign threats included in proposed FY 2012 White House budget

 There, I've just demonstrated how we can save $185 billion per year in expenditures by reducing our spending on killing people or preparing to kill people. That's over $2 trillion in reductions over the next ten years as our Overseas Contingency Operations and atomic weapon arsenal costs are permanently reduced. 

  I would probably make even deeper cuts, but this proposal is politically feasible, I think.

Student responds to "Why Do We Fight"

Reaction Paper # 2

Film- Why Do We Fight?

The film by Eugene Jarecki, Why Do We Fight, that we watched in class touched a sore subject with me. My family is a military family, including myself. My father has fought in multiple wars and my grandfather died in Desert Storm. I do not believe some of what the movie was broadcasting was true. For starters, people claim the United States spends more on the defense discretionary budget then anything else. This may be true, we do spent a lot of money on defense; but it is not always used in the most efficient ways when it gets to our fighting soldiers. In fact, many of the deaths on the American side during our current fight for freedom, are solely because we do not have enough or proper equipment to protect us from the enemy.

I deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom in 2004-2005. While I was there, my platoon lost one female soldier because the truck she was in hit an IED. She would have survived with injuries had her truck been properly equipped with armor. We drove on the roads to and from Kuwait and Iraq for days on end without the proper truck armor for at least the first five months of my deployment. That should of never happened, if in fact we do spend so much money on defense.

Also, I did not like the fact that the movie pointed out, that we have no agreement on this question: Why do we fight? Yes, I believe when there is a reason to go to war to prevent attacks against the U.S. and our allies, then by all means go to war and fight for our freedom. But don't tell our citizens lies about why we are going to war. The movie showed children and adults defending freedom as the reason we went to war, but there were other reasons thrown out as well. For instance, people thought we were fighting Iraq to prevent other attacks on U.S. soil. But shortly after, there was word that we were fighting for cheaper oil, to catch Saddam, and to find weapons of mass destruction. The government lied to the people, and they continue to lie. Will we ever be able to trust the government again? Over a half a million extra people died due to government policy.

While I was deployed, I personally got to witness death and destruction. But I also got to be part of history. The year I was fighting in Iraq was the first year women had the right to vote, December 2005. But this was not true about the women in all Arab countries, but hopefully soon it will happen. I also learned the real reason why the Arabic people have been fighting all these years. They are fighting a religious war, over whose land belongs to who and where the boundaries are. I do not believe this war involves us at all. The government is just wasting money, time, and resources sending more and more troops to a fighting country that will never be happy. The majority of our troops that are dying over there is simply because we got in the way. The women and children that are dying in country are dying at the hands of their own people as well.

The main reason I show "Why Do We Fight?" is because it demonstrates the main competing type of government spending, which is military spending. We spend maybe $800 billion on Social Security, and then nearly $700 billion on health (Medicare, Medicaid, Centers for Disease Control, NIH, etc., and actually much more if we include state contributions to Medicaid), and we spend about $600 billion (actually a bit more) on defense (if we are including Homeland Security, Veteran's Administration, and various other benefits related to defense in addition to the Defense Department's budget). Combined state and federal spending on justice and law enforcement and corrections is perhaps $185-$200 billion. Public spending on education from preschool through higher education is a bit over $900 billion, although most of this is collected and spent at the state level without much of a federal contribution. If we want to allocate more money to social services, crime prevention, interventions to reduce recidivism in convicts released from incarceration, poverty reduction, health, affordable housing, or education, the natural target for cuts would be defense. But, as the film showed, there are powerful economic and political interests that give us policies that continue to fund defense at rates around $600 billion, which may be over twice what we actually need.

Clearly there was a rational argument to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. There were good rational arguments against each occupation as well. If people really believed Iraq posed a threat to us, and also believed a pre-emptive strike based on this perceived threat was justified, then such beliefs could be used to support the occupation of Iraq. I didn't believe Iraq posed a threat, and I rejected the notion of pre-emptive strikes against countries that aren't directly threatening us, so I demonstrated against the invasion of Iraq. But, even as I did so, I realized that in an ideal international system some sort of multinational coalition would coercively remove the Ba'ath Party and the ruling elites such as Saddam Husain from power in Iraq. I'd like to live in a world were a humanitarian coalition of powerful governments would combine their forces to remove the worst despots and tyrannies from power and give oppressed people a chance to gave better governments replace the totalitarian or murderous regimes that misrule them. So, from that perspective, even if Iraq posed no threat to us, I could hope for the best. But, I expected the worst, because it seemed clear to me that the powers organizing Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom were incompetent, historically ignorant, culturally insensitive, and willfully stupid. I expected them to botch the occupation and alienate the Iraqi people, and many of my fears were confirmed. Thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives were wasted.

Women probably had a "better" situation relative to men under the Ba'ath regime in the sense that women and men were equally oppressed and enjoyed approximately equal freedoms and rights (what little they had of those). I think our success (and it's a fragile and shaky success, but I hope it takes root and gains strength) was to let Iraqis vote for their political leadership so that the government would be accountable to the people. In the long term, I hope Iraqi women can regain their standing of equality to men (which I recognize had been imperfectly attained under the Ba'ath regime), a standing I believe has been partly lost with the (hopefully temporary) rise of religious fanaticism and literalism and factionalism in Iraq.

I've just read an interesting book that seems to explain how American foreign policy could have much more success against the very real and dangerous threat of murderous death cults masquerading under the guise of Islamic Fundamentalism, and with your experiences in Iraq you might enjoy reading this book. It is An End to Al-Qaeda, and it's written by Malcolm Nance.

You are probably aware that women have been voting in meaningful democratic elections in Lebanon, Algeria, Jordan, and Morocco for decades. Women have had the vote, but elections are relatively meaningless, in most of the other Arab countries (e.g., Egypt, Tunisia), aside from those that don't even have any sort of reasonable elections because royal families or totalitarian single-party dictatorships rule everything (as in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, etc.). The Iraqi elections in 2005 you witnessed were meaningful, and I hope that soon the Iraqi people will be able to enjoy the fruits of universal enfranchisement and free and fair elections, and they will not give up this precious system, bought with so much blood and sacrifice by Iraqis, Americans, and others.

FY 2011 Budget Proposed by White House

The White House has proposed a budget for FY-2011, with projections out for several years into the future. There are huge cuts in the federal budget planned for FY-2012, including a $45 billion cut in defense spending (why not a $90 billion cut, I wonder?). There are optimistic forecasts of savings from health care reform ($7 billion in FY 2011 and $17 billion in FY 2012, with a $23 billion drop in Medicaid spending from $297 billion to $274 billion) between 2011 and 2012.

The budget deficit we're building up now to take care of the economy will mean that our payments on the national debt go up from $251 billion in FY 2011 to $343 billion in FY 2012. Still, our servicing of the national debt is only about 6.5% of the total federal budget. That's not too bad just yet, but when we are out of the recession and unemployment drops below 7% we need to balance the federal budget so we can reduce the national debt and use a smaller portion of federal spending on debt servicing. The proposed budgets with the long-term forecast don't show us ever balancing the federal budget.

I noticed that only 0.3% of the federal outlays go to international aid (USAID, Peace Corps, Development Banks, and so forth—the only unlabeled sliver of the pie chart above). It seems to me we ought to be spending about 1% on foreign aid. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention combined get about 1.0% of the federal budget. These are some of a very few areas where big cuts aren't planned. Still, it seems to me unwise to devote 13.5% of the budget to defense and security from violent threats from abroad and only spend 1% on diseases and health threats at home. Why not spend 3% of the federal budget on health research and prevention of disease and injury and then cut defense spending to 6% or 7% instead of 13.5%?

Anyway, I recommend people check out the proposed budget on their own.

More about military spending

We watched a film in class about why so much of federal spending goes to the military. If you are interested in exploring this issue, I have some links to recommend.

The website for the film we watched.

Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address.

A report on what we are doing wrong in Afghanistan from the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict.

If you get a chance, watch Afghanistan Year 1380.

Study military contracts at the Military Industrial Complex website.

War resisters' website discussion of how much of our federal spending goes to defense.

More about the federal budget.

The White House's page about defense policy.

A radical perspective from Alexander Cockburn on the death count in Iraq.