Taxes are good for you (all of us)

[Image from nymag.com]

Larry Beinhart, writing at AlterNet, suggests that we don't need lower taxes, we need higher taxes.

Many folks in Florida are beginning to come to the same conclusion. Florida, the government being run by rich Republicans, has been busy lowering taxes and now we're paying the piper; the pain is palpable. All of a sudden there is not enough money to do much of anything: pay for our schools, hire sufficient law enforcement personnel, repair our infrastructure, retain needed social services, etc.

All of a sudden, the same people who voted for lowering taxes are showing up at school board meetings crying mightily when schools are closed, teachers are let go, and popular programs are abandoned because of insufficient revenues.


Beinhart says that "US economic growth has been strongest when our taxes have been high. During World War II, then under Trumen, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, our upper marginal tax rates were between 88-92%. ... Those were our strongest growth years."

Beinhart is referring only to income taxes and only on the "very richest" in our society.

All of this, of course, flies in the face of conventional "conservative" (read Republican) economic theory which maintains that "tax cuts lead to economic growth." NOT TRUE!

"Moderate tax cuts lead to a flat economy. ...

"Large tax cuts are followed by a boom in the financial sector, a bubble, and a crash. Then a recession or depression with massive bank failures. This has happened three times, in the 1920s, under Reagan, and under George W. Bush."

Do we never learn?


Tax hikes, says Beinhart, bring strong economic growth because they "usually correspond to higher government spending.

"Government spends money on things that the private sector does not spend money on: physical infrastructure, social infrastructure, market infrastructure, and defense.

"Those are the things that create a world in which doing business in possible. The worse those things are, the worse business is. The better they are, the better business is."

Furthermore, we can have increased government spending only with tax hikes.


But, nobody likes to raise taxes. "Nobody likes to give up their personal money for the common good.

"People with a lot of money have, over the past fifty years, spent a fortune on exploiting that instinct and pandering to that feeling. Eventually, with nobody willing to say publicly that taxes are good, they took over the dialogue. It is now routine to hear tax cuts as refered to as 'pro-growth' policies, even though, in fact, that's not true. It is routine to hear tax hikes called 'anti-growth' policies, when that's not true.

"The rich, the Republicans, and the Right, have lost this last election, but they still own the mythology."


Read the entire article here.

The salvation in "Salvation Boulevard"

Larry Beinhart, of Wag the Dog fame, has a new novel out, Salvation Boulevard. It's a tangled, messy, brilliant, sexy tale of a murdered atheist college professor; a Muslim college student, who after being tortured, confesses to the crime; a TV evangelist busy "reclaiming America for Christ" and building a complex of church and city to safely ensconce the saved; a Jewish lawyer who dies but doesn't go away; and the lawyer's investigator who was once saved by the evangelist, but in the course of events, loses his faith, only to find himself and faith once again.

But all of that is the wrapping. The gift inside the wrapping is a delightful and delicate romp through all those God questions with which humans struggle, the biggest of which has to do with the co-existence of evil and a beneficent diety.


Here's a taste.

Nate, the college professor, introduced his students to theodicy [how can we reconcile a loving god with all the evil in the world] by telling a story:

"A man is sitting beside a pool, enjoying his cigar and a mojito. A woman and her child are nearby. A stone falls out of the sky and knocks the woman out. Unattended, the child falls into the pool. It's only three feet deep, so it would be easy for the man to get up and rescue the toddler, but he sits by and watches the child drown. When the woman wakes up, she finds her baby dead. She screams and weeps. She yells at the man smoking his cigar, 'Why didn't you save my baby?' The man tells her she should be grateful for this great chance to experience grief and loss. Furthermore, she should love and adore him for giving her that opportunity."

In the discussion that follows, the professor says, "Here's the question, the real question. We all agree that the man was evil. How is it that we hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than we hold God?"


Toward the end of the story, the detective, a born-again, "evangelical" Christian, saved by the power of God through the TV evangelist's laying on of hands, has lost his faith:

"It wasn't a matter of finding some other church, maybe one less dogmatic and certain. Or some other pastor, one less powerful and less of a sinner. The lesson of the parable, for me, was that belief, in and of itself, was neither good nor evil. It wasn't even a guide to good and evil. They existed independently of faith, came from a different source and resided in a different place."


At the end of the story, the detective has found "salvation" more or less. It's not what you might think.


There's more here.