Calling a sacred cow what it is

    I wanna grow up to be a politician, and take over this beautiful land. — The Byrds

    Eric Cantor needs to grow up. Unfortunately, the Republican House majority leader equates a tantrum with statesmanship. He is prepared to hold his breath until, well, until the federal government ceases to operate.

    President Obama should grant his wish. Take the Bill Clinton route. Put the blame for the collapse of debt-ceiling talks on the shoulders of those who refuse to talk.

    Cantor and Arizona Sen. John Kyl abruptly withdrew from talks overseen by Vice President Joe Biden because Biden and the Democrats wanted to talk about ways to raise revenue by closing tax subsidies and loopholes that benefit those who need no tax break.

      The latest impasse drew President Obama directly into the fray, the White House saying Republicans need to stop protecting "some of their sacred cows."

       That's putting it exactly as it should be. The GOP makes a habit of saying how the opposition fights to protect spending. What about tax dodges and subsidies?

      The administration has made compromises. The Bush tax cuts were allowed to endure into a new year — hundreds of billions of dollars in debt left on the backs of future taxpayers, plus interest.

       Obama has recommended spending cuts galore, including a freeze on federal pay. That's called compromise. Do the Republicans not have any responsibility to reciprocate?

        This is all about the absurd notion that somehow we can achieve $2 trillion in deficit reduction without increasing revenue in any way.

         With tea parties providing loud encouragement, the Republican Party adheres to the assertion that the revenue the federal government has is sufficient to pay for decades of activism including the largest peacetime defense buildup (Reagan), three wars (G.H.W. Bush, G.W. Bush) and a vastly underpriced expansion of Medicare.

       Built into this is the spiel that America's tax rates are oppressive and constantly rising. That, upon inspection, is a cured meat which could be easily shot down by Carl Sagan's "baloney detection kit."

       Taxes — federal and state combined, are their lowest as a percentage of GDP as they have been at any time since 1950. As Fareed Zakaria writes in Time magazine, the United States is among the lowest taxed of the large industrial nations.

      Anyway, Obama and the Democrats aren't proposing to raise the taxes of all Americans, though they should. Every American should pay more for all the government they've bought, and substantially more, because simply cutting spending is not going to resolve our debt problem. Even the draconian debt reduction plan of Illinois Republican Rep. Paul Ryan assumes tax hikes would have to come into play, um, way down the line.

    Why not now? How now, sacred cow?

     Republicans let out shrieks when Bill Clinton managed to engineer a tax increase on America's wealthiest taxpayers. Fiscal visionaries like Phil Gramm and Jesse Helms said the economy would tank. Devastation. Armageddon. What happened, if anyone recalls, was quite the opposite. For a brief glimmer of time the federal government actually bought back some of its debt: Yes, a surplus.

      When a one-vote majority on the Supreme Court gave George W. Bush custody of that surplus, he of "cut taxes first, figure it all out later," the surplus evaporated quicker than dew on a gila monster.

     It is high time to start thinking of our misguided tax policies in the same way we spend on things we don't need, like, for instance, policing the world against threats real and imagined.

      For one, says Robert McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice, our tax system "lets many of our biggest and most profitable corporations pay little or no tax."

      "Little or no." That's what the Eric Cantors of the world call oppressive and confiscatory. They're going to hold their breaths rather than address these tax inequities.

      Let them, Mr. President.

      Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Time to govern? Harrumph

    In Blazing Saddles, cross-eyed Gov. William J. Le Petomane, hearing the town of Rock Ridge has met disaster at the hands of outlaws, announces to his coterie:

    "We've got to protect our phony baloney jobs, gentleman. We must do something about this immediately, immediately, immediately."

     "Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph!" goes his echo chamber.

     So, the governor issues a decree to make it even worse for Rock Ridge — which by the way is obstructing construction of the railroad.

     Harrumph, harrumph.

     Arizona has been ablaze, battling one of its most devastating wildfires with all its resources. Well, not exactly.

     The state, stewing in a sauna of right-wing anti-tax fundamentalism, has cut $1.2 million since 2009 from set aside funds to prevent and stop wildfires. Hmmm. Could've used that.

     Government is the problem, understand, until you need it.

     One of the untold stories of Hurricane Katrina was how poorly it reflected, not on government per se but on those in government who thought the free market could do government's job better. Heckuva job.

    This included contractors hired by the FEMA to provide emergency transportation in a hurricane, but who were tied in knots of the kind of red tape that we are led to be believe can be tied only to — ack — bureaucrats.

     In Texas, a veritable bureaucrat massacre was waged under Gov. Rick Perry, who entrusted social services to a computer system that was supposed to obviate the need for all those paper shufflers. It ended up being a debacle beyond imagining. Texas ended up rescinding reams of pink slips to state employees who, it turned out, were actually needed to serve other people.

     By Perry's quill stroke, the state authorized a massive privatization of the Department of Human Services, including mental health and mental retardation. Bidders were not expected to show that they could run these services better, or at a savings to taxpayers. They were just supposed to show up, bid and take them off to their respective carnal lairs. When the vastness and intricacy of these enterprises became clear — biting off more than one can chew, as it were — the bidders stayed away.

     You see, sometimes you need government.

      Unfortunately — OK, horrifically — the Gov. Le Petomanes of the world continue to profit from doing things that don't serve their constituents, at least those who need what government does.

       What we see increasingly is people ascending to government not to govern but to find increasing ways to impede governing.

       Texas schools face $4 billion in budget cuts — billion with a "b" — if a bill passed by the state House survives.

        This fiscal tough love, Texans are led to believe, was made necessary by the terrible economy. Well, yes, and no. A big reason why Texas schools are in this hole is because Perry and the Legislature dug it several years ago. On the pretense of school finance reform, they authorized a property tax cut that was not matched by the means to recoup the lost dollars through a new business tax.

        How convenient this has all been. Laissez faire policies and grandstanding politicians allowed the economy to collapse, and now say that calamity means it's time for more of their kind of medicine, which calls for dismantling government services.

      In Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes about how right-wing schemers have seized on catastrophes manmade and otherwise to dissemble the kind of government that helps the masses, this in favor of the kind that gets sold off to insiders. It's happening across the country and in other countries.

      Who does Gov. Le Petomane serve? The railroad. And so he is content to consign Rock Ridge to the dust.

      The amazing thing is that through any number of appeals — say, to piety, to bigotry — the governor knows he'll be re-elected. And so does the railroad.

       Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Stop America's costliest war

    The sad thing is that bad things always come with "war."

    Sure, war is a bad thing unto itself. And when will we study something other than war when we measure ourselves and our leaders? Dylan songs aside, when?

    But the concern here is the term — war — which we toss around like we toss around "clearance sale" and "now with fluoride."

    Naming anything a "war," except the kind that summons a nation's every sinew, as in the mobilization of Dec. 7, 1941, is not only fallacious but ultimately self-defeating. 

    "War on poverty"? Bad choice, Mr. President. Can't defeat poverty. You can ameliorate it in many ways, and you did. But "war"?

     "War on terror"? Maybe the worst word choice in our nation's history. John Kerry was absolutely right in challenging the term. Ironically, the decorated war veteran committed the error of just not being brazenly militant enough for the moment.

     Terror is a condition. Terrorism is a means to that end. War involves rolling tanks, killing innocents (war's own means to its end), naming names — governmentwise, while unaffiliated shadow players do what terrorists do with primitive means.

     War involves suspending our own hard-fought rights and abdicating democracy to the executive branch.

     And in the case of the "war on terror," it appears to be all the above without end.

      But if "war on terror" has an open-endedness to it, what about "war on drugs"? It has become, literally, a life term. Afghanistan, now 10 years on? Vietnam? Cost and duration considered, no "war" we've known compares.

       The war on drugs is America's costliest, most futile endeavor to ever acquire the term "war," and looks to outlive anyone who ever conceived it or first nodded in assent. For what?

      Considering what we are doing, spending, and committing in terms of human capital, the recent report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy deserved banner front-page treatment — right alongside the latest Charlie Sheen update.

      The report, from a group that includes ex-heads of state and such diverse voices as former Secretary of State (under Ronald Reagan) George Shultz, former Fed chairman Paul Volker and former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, called the war on drugs a total failure "with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world."

      Yes, it didn't just call the effort a dud, a fizzle, a fiasco. It called it destructive — "devastating."

       Say, how much have we been spending to achieve all that?

       State and federal, we're spending about $40 billion a year. Sure, that's chump change compared to occupying two countries militarily. But that's not the only cost of the drug war.

     This year some 1.6 million Americans will be arrested for drug possession or distribution. Like the military bases we set up overseas, we will then commit to housing, feeding and otherwise tending to the needs of each of them for an indeterminate time.

      The Global Commission said such repressive strategies cannot succeed. Only strategies that approach drug abuse as a medical or societal problem short of criminality will work. It pointed out that the most repressive countries about drugs — like Russia and Thailand — have the worst drug problems per capita. Countries on the polar, holistic, side of the equation like Switzerland and Australia have the fewest problems.

     The commission recommends an end to the militant approach to drugs, and the legalization of marijuana.

      The White House challenged the commission's findings, just like a war department would do. At least it acknowledged the fact that we cannot arrest and prosecute our way to a better day. We need a stronger and clear-eyed approach to treatment, it said. Agreed.

      With several states now having legalized medical marijuana, with police looking the other way when hundreds of thousands of young people openly light up joints each spring on "4-20," we are in many ways in the phase we saw in the last two to three years of Vietnam and today in Afghanistan — sensing that we can't achieve much more with war, but being unable to figure a way to end it.

     The answer is to get real about costs, about pyrrhic results, about the benefits of undercutting organized crime by treating pot differently. Start by finding another name for a fiasco.

     Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.