Daily Archives: October 21, 2008

The 44 Percent

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From the Wall Street Journal:

Now we know: 95% of Americans will get a “tax cut” under Barack Obama after all. Those on the receiving end of a check will include the estimated 44% of Americans who will owe no federal income taxes under his plan.

In most parts of America, getting money back on taxes you haven’t paid sounds a lot like welfare. Ah, say the Obama people, you forget: Even those who pay no income taxes pay payroll taxes for Social Security. Under the Obama plan, they say, these Americans would get an income tax credit up to $500 based on what they are paying into Social Security.

Just two little questions: If people are going to get a tax refund based on what they pay into Social Security, then we’re not really talking about income tax relief, are we? And if what we’re really talking about is payroll tax relief, doesn’t that mean billions of dollars in lost revenue for a Social Security trust fund that is already badly underfinanced?

I googled for some statement by the Obama campaign that FICA taxes will be reduced, and found nothing. Maybe your luck will be better, if you want to look. Possibly the genius who wrote the WSJ editorial has never looked at a standard paycheck and doesn’t realize that withheld income taxes and withheld FICA taxes are two separate line items and not the same thing. Can anyone else explain what this guy is talking about?

Further, it’s important to understand that in McCain World, payroll taxes are taxes paid by the employer and not the employee. In other words, the income taxes withheld from paychecks are not being “paid” by the employee. Hence, workers whose taxes are paid through payroll taxes do not actually pay taxes.

That’s where they’re coming up with “the estimated 44% of Americans who will owe no federal income taxes.” They “owe” no taxes because taxes are withheld from their paychecks, and they have no other income to declare.

[Update: The Anonymous Liberal says these are people who don’t earn enough to pay income taxes. Maybe, but are we talking apples and oranges? Is Obama talking about 95 percent of wage earners getting tax cuts, as he says, while McCain is talking about 44 percent of all Americans? I’ve never seen a paycheck so small that there wasn’t a teeny bit of income tax taken out of it.]

And in the minds of the conservative elite, such people do not deserve tax breaks. Giving them a tax reduction is welfare, since they didn’t pay taxes, anyway. And, in fact, a few days ago, some right-wing TV bobblehead actually said that most average-income bus drivers, teachers, and autoworkers “don’t pay any taxes.”

Of course, most working people don’t think that way. To most working people payroll tax deductions are taxes they pay. But to McCain, giving most working people a tax break amounts to “welfare,” because, you see, they don’t pay taxes. That makes a tax break for them a “transfer of wealth” and not a tax break.

A number of rightie bloggers have picked up this argument and are running with it, including Betsy Newmark, who says “Barack Obama is planning to give a tax break to [people who] don’t pay income taxes.” Betsy Newmark is a teacher. Very likely Betsy in the 44 percent.

And she doesn’t know. She assumes the “44 percent” are some other people, not her. As Atrios says,

I’m really never quite sure who this “don’t pay any taxes” stuff is aimed at. Though, thinking about it just this second, maybe I do. Basically everybody pays taxes. So you when you’re talking about giving free money to people who don’t pay any taxes, that must be somebody else because, you know, I pay taxes.

I suppose that works.

That’s exactly it. It must be some other bus divers, teachers and auto workers who don’t pay taxes. Or maybe the 44 percent are people who don’t work. But Obama specifically says his tax cuts are for working people. So that can’t be it.

Don’t any of these people, you know, think?

More Gold Plates

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The Los Angeles Times is beginning a three-part series on the health insurance mess. Part one, “An eroding model for health insurance,” discusses people who were dumped by their insurers for minor, treatable illnesses.

This is, of course, a problem that righties say does not exist. Maybe the LA Times is just making stuff up.

Update on my physical therapy issues — my physical therapy doctor says he will tell Empire Blue Cross that my leg came off, so I need a few more physical therapy sessions. We go through this dance all the time, he said. Of course, Empire Blue Cross will argue, “she can hop.”

Smart Talk

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Some right-wing blogs are discussing articulation versus intelligence. Todd Zywicki writes,

This piece by Randall Hoven on American Thinker raises a question that I’ve been wondering about, namely how it came to be that many people believe that Sarah Palin is not smart enough to be Vice-President. I think that what it probably explains it is a tendency to confuse glibness with intelligence, or perhaps more accurately, to confuse the ability to “bullshit” with actual intelligence.

This begs the question, what does he mean by “smart”? For the record, I don’t think Sarah Palin is stupid, if by “not stupid” we mean having a capacity to learn. I am guessing she has an above-average IQ.

I would say the better word is “unprepared.” Her knowledge of world affairs is, shall we say, shallow. But I think if someone gave her a job in the State Department that required her to learn, in five to ten years she might be a match for Henry Kissinger. Not that I care for Kissinger, but whatever you think of him, he’s not stupid.

For that matter, George W. Bush probably has, or had, as much cognitive capacity as most other presidents. People who know him say he’s not stupid, just intellectually lazy. If something interests him, he can learn about it quickly enough. It’s just that there’s a world of stuff that doesn’t interest him.

Lack of intelligence and lack of knowledge are both called “stupid,” but they are not the same thing. I get the impression that until recently Sarah Palin has not given much thought to issues that don’t directly affect Alaska. And that was fine, as long as her job was all about Alaska. But it’s not fine for a POTUS. And the depth of knowledge she needs to be POTUS is not something even a very bright person could pick up in a few easy lessons. It takes years.

I spent a lot of my life editing other people’s writing. I noticed a long time ago that sloppy language reveals sloppy thinking. The blog post linked above is an example; the words smart and intelligence are not used with precision. “Smart” means a lot of different things. Palin is smart in some ways and not smart in others.

And there are people who use language in lieu of thinking. Victor Davis Hanson’s verbose essays are mostly word salads, for example. Christopher Hitchens can turn out clever sentences, but he doesn’t tie his clever sentences together to make defensible arguments. He leaves gaps one could drive a truck through. His essays tend to be much less than the sum of their parts.

Some of us are better at writing than speaking. I’ve had a little experience at public speaking, and manage not to suck at it too much, but if I want to be very clear I’d rather write. I have sympathy for the candidates when their mouths get ahead of their heads and the words come out wrong. Sometimes a stumble is just a stumble and not anything to get excited about.

However, show me a person whose language is consistently sloppy, and I’ll show you a sloppy thinker. An adult of above-average intelligence, speaking or writing in his native language, ought to be able to convey his ideas coherently. His rhetoric may be wooden and graceless, and that’s OK, but if it’s fuzzy, it’s darn near certain his ideas are fuzzy, too.

Regarding Barack Obama — the blogger linked above says,

Obama has this ability to fall back on empty stock-phrases that he utters with a furrowed brow and gravitas, projecting a perception of intelligence and understanding even if what he is saying is largely devoid of substance. For instance, it seems relatively clear that neither McCain nor Obama has the slightest clue about what caused the financial crisis or what to do about it. But McCain’s discomfort and lack of knowledge when it comes to talking about the financial crisis is transparent, whereas Obama is able to cogently spout empty generalities that obscure his lack of knowledge.

It’s true that many of Obama’s stump speeches are more soaring rhetoric than substance. However, he is one of the few people in national politics who does do substance when it’s called for. The “race” speech and the “faith” speech are examples. The guy is a real thinker. You can tell he likes to dig beneath the surface of issues and understand them deeply. This is a trait I appreciate.

However, people who are sloppy thinkers themselves don’t appreciate clarity of thought. They like to wallow in the warm familiarity of stock phrases and comforting biases; all other communication bounces off them without leaving a dent. Anything that requires critical thinking to understand probably won’t register.