“Makers” Making Hay

Remember Mitt Romney’s division of Americans into the “Makers” and the “Takers”? That division reflected the GOP’s longstanding policy of privileging the privileged.

Americans argue a lot about the meaning of “privilege,” but there is plenty of research confirming that–whatever other attributes may confer social or fiscal privilege–there’s hardly anything better than being rich.

I’ve posted before about the research confirming that education vouchers are disproportionately used by families whose children are already in private schools–most of whom can well afford to pay the tuition. Our tax dollars are relieving them of that obligation. How very nice of us!

And of course, it isn’t exactly a secret that the richest Americans make out like bandits when it comes to federal taxes. As the Center for American Progress has reported, low-income Americans pay higher payroll tax rates than rich Americans, the state and local tax (SALT) deduction is extremely regressive, and mortgage interest deductions are skewed toward the rich. Meanwhile, long-term capital gains and qualified dividends—both of which are forms of capital income that are taxed at lower, preferential rates—”overwhelmingly accrue to the rich.” And Republicans have pretty much eliminated estate taxes on the basis that they are not fair to the “Makers” who want to enrich their children and grandchildren.

There has been less attention focused on state-level tax rates, but a recent report from The Hill confirms a widespread suspicion that state-level taxes are similarly skewed. It turns out–surprise!!– the rich don’t pay anything remotely close to their fair share of state tax burdens. And it isn’t only their ability to pay clever accountants that largely exempts the rich from those pesky tax bills.

The wealthiest families in most states are paying lower tax rates than everyone else, a new analysis found.

The new study conducted by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analyzed the tax systems across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., by looking into how each of seven different income groups pays state and local tax rates.

The study ultimately found that the lower someone’s income is, the higher their overall effective state and local tax rate is.

“On average, the lowest-income 20 percent of taxpayers face a state and local tax rate nearly 60 percent higher than the top 1 percent of households,” the analysis states.

In 41 states, the top 1 percent of families have a lower tax rate than everyone else, according to the analysis. In 42 states, the top 1 percent of earners pay less than the bottom 20 percent, and in 46 states the top 1 percent are taxed at a lower rate than the middle 60 percent, the study found.

The study found that only six states, plus Washington, D.C., tax the bottom 20 percent of income brackets at the lowest rate: New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Minnesota and Maine. Indiana is among the thirty-four states that tax low-income families at higher rates than everyone else.

So if you are a struggling “Taker” in the Hoosier state, or in another one of those thirty-four states, you get punished for being poor. I found this absolutely gob-smacking.

There are all kinds of arguments (good, bad and indifferent) against raising tax rates for the rich–including what level of taxation can be considered punitive, where the lines should be drawn between brackets, and the level of taxation of businesses that might have a negative effect on productivity. But I am unaware of any rational argument for saying, in effect, “let’s hit these folks while they’re down.” Or, “let’s get the money we need to operate state government from poor folks so we don’t have to annoy our rich citizens.”

I’m sure the fact that political donations come predominantly from the upper bracket of earners has absolutely nothing to do with it. (And I have a bridge in Florida to sell you…)

Given the amount of attention our state legislators focus on taxes, and their constant public  hand-wringing and crocodile tears about the need to protect citizens from the burden of taxation, I find it very interesting–and very disheartening– that so little attention has been paid to the over-taxing of those least able to pay and the unconscionable under-taxing of those with ample resources.

Assuming We the People emerge more or less intact from the existential threats we face– to democracy, civility and the planet– we really need to have a data-based discussion of tax policy.

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Now They’re After The Libraries

The Indiana General Assembly is back in session. This time, mercifully, it’s a short session, but that hasn’t stopped the supermajority from continuing its efforts to turn Indiana into Mississippi.

A commentary by my friend Michael Leppert recently began by poking fun at bills filed by lawmakers who were apparently unable to employ legislative language that would actually accomplish what seemed to be their goals. He  then moved on to bills introduced so far during this legislative session that “aren’t humorous, or merely humorless. They are hateful.” 

One of those hateful bills is House Bill 1291, filed by Rep. Chris Judy, R-Fort Wayne. That bill

attempts to erase the word “gender” from the Indiana Code and replace it with “biological sex.” He wants to legally cancel all transgender people in Indiana. If his bill were to pass, as filed, transgender people would no longer exist in the state. The bill creates definitions for other things too. Words like “woman,” “man,” “girl,” and “boy,” would now all mean what the legislature says they mean. 

Leppert is entirely correct that the cited bill is hateful, and its effects would be assisted and strengthened by a seemingly unrelated effort to destroy–or at least severely hobble–the state’s public libraries.

As WFYI reports

Indiana Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that would drastically change the way public libraries are funded and limit the types of events and activities they can host. The legislation could also potentially result in decreased funding for library services.

Senate Bill 32, authored by Sens. Jim Tomes (R-Wadesville) and Gary Byrne (R-Byrneville), would eliminate the ability for public libraries to impose property taxes. Instead, libraries would need to submit their budgets for approval to their local city or county government, in the same way that other municipal departments do. 

The proposal comes months after legislation that makes it easier for community members to request removals of books from schools was signed into law. And libraries across the country have come under fire in recent years for hosting events like drag queen story hours, or for including books in their young adult collections that some people find objectionable.

Byrne, you will recall, was the lawmaker trying to stop a nonprofit program giving voters  free rides to the polls (although Leppert points out that the language in his bill was so imprecise it would prevent transit companies from giving any person a free or reduced fare for any reason on election days.)

Senate Bill 32 would have a massively negative impact on libraries and their patrons. For one thing, it would allow counties to choose not to fund a public library at all. But the bill would do more than “merely” strike at library funding; it would prevent libraries from engaging in a wide variety of activities that currently benefit their communities.

The proposed legislation would also restrict libraries to a set of “core functions,” that are limited to public access to library materials, quiet areas for study, technical assistance, and acquisition of services for members of the public.

But public libraries typically offer a much wider array of services, including early literacy programs, science, technology, education and math programs, as well as dedicated makerspace labs, community programming like author talks, music performances and art exhibits.

Increasingly, libraries have also begun to offer social work services to help patrons gain access to government assistance, housing and mental health services.

In a statement, the Indiana Library Federation said the bill doesn’t take into account the ways modern public libraries operate as community hubs. As the Library Federation points out, “Not providing library patrons with these services would directly affect public libraries from meeting Indiana State Library compliance standards.”

The Federation also listed the numerous ways that public libraries are fiscally accountable. They are governed by boards whose members are appointed by local elected officials.

Library boards approve annual budgets, and they host public meetings and hearings on those budgets. Library budgets are publicly available, and they’re also submitted to the state’s Department of Local Government Finance and the State Board of Accounts for review. Rogers said libraries are also routinely audited by the state.

If passed, the bill would result in an increased administrator workload for municipal and county governments — which would have to take on the duties of budget oversight and approval for libraries, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency.

But if libraries are free to enlighten (or–horror of horrors–to host Drag Queen story hours) some citizens might realize–among other things– that trans people exist!

Your Indiana Republican legislators: working around the clock to defund and neuter any part of government that might educate Hoosier citizens. 

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Speaking Of Higher Education

With all the media focus on a handful of “elite” universities, perhaps it’s time (or overdue) to take a look at some of the hundreds of small colleges and universities that dot the country and are most definitely not “woke.” A number of them are religious, and several–like Hillsdale–are proudly “conservative.” (I put quotes around conservative because true conservatives have very little in common with the political movement that has appropriated that label.)

I’ve been aware of Hillsdale for a number of years. I’ve had graduate students who matriculated there, and several years ago I wrote a book about a libertarian organization headquartered in Indiana that–according to its Executive Director– was scammed by Hillsdale and its then-President. I still get –and routinely discard–their slick newsletter.

The New York Times recently did a “deep dive” into Hillsdale’s more recent political shenanigans.

A few days before Thanksgiving 2020, a half-dozen or so people gathered at the home of a Michigan lawyer named Robert E. Norton II.

Norton is the general counsel of Hillsdale College, a small, conservative Christian school in the southern part of the state. One of his guests was Ian Northon, a Hillsdale alumnus and private lawyer who did work for the college. Also in attendance were a couple of state lawmakers, Beth Griffin and Julie Alexander, who represented conservative districts north of Detroit.

Northon would later describe the meeting to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol. “Somebody at Hillsdale reached out to me, said they are going to have this little meeting,” he testified. “I went to it. There were a handful of reps there, and then Giuliani called in.” That, of course, was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor turned personal lawyer to President Donald J. Trump.

Hillsdale was already well connected to the Right. Northon had worked for the Amistad Project, an “election-integrity watchdog” that the Times reported “emerged as a primary partner in the Trump campaign’s election-fraud litigation.” He’d been a vice president of the Bradley Foundation, a Milwaukee-based Rightwing philanthropy that has funded groups pushing voter-fraud conspiracy theories.

And most prominent was Hillsdale’s president, Larry P. Arnn. Over two decades, Arnn had fashioned the college as an avatar of resistance to progressivism, all the while amassing relationships with many of the influencers and financiers who were transforming conservative politics in America. By the time Trump swept into the White House in 2017, Arnn had made Hillsdale an academic darling and supplier of philosophical gravitas to the new right.

So prominent was Arnn that he was mentioned as a possible education secretary before losing out to Betsy DeVos, part of a wealthy Michigan family of major conservative donors and Hillsdale patrons. (Her brother, the private-security contractor Erik Prince, is an alumnus.) Hillsdale graduates became aides in the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill and clerks at the Supreme Court. (“We have hired many staff from Hillsdale,” says Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to Trump’s vice president and Arnn’s longtime friend, Mike Pence.) In the Covid years, the backlash against school closures, mask mandates and diversity programs made education perhaps the most important culture-wars battleground. Hillsdale was at the center, and nowhere more than in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis frequently invoked Hillsdale as he sought to cleanse the state’s schools of liberal influence. “How many places other than Hillsdale are actually standing for truth?” he said at a 2022 Hillsdale-sponsored event in Naples, Fla.

The Times article explored the way in which this small Michigan college got mixed up in the plot to subvert American democracy, and it certainly makes for fascinating reading. But Hillsdale is hardly the only small religious institution providing an academic environment actively indoctrinating students against progressive political beliefs.

There are some 900 Christian-affiliated colleges in the United States, and while not all of them emulate Hillsdale, those that  pride themselves on turning out “conservative” students collectively educate thousands of young Americans–far, far more than matriculate from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, et al.

I suppose pointing this out is a form of “what-aboutism.” I certainly do not intend it as an argument that all is well in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League; there is plenty of hypocrisy masquerading as inclusiveness on those campuses, and the fact that their graduates are over-represented in government and academia makes them proper targets for evaluation and–when warranted– criticism.  

I just think that criticism should be–in the immortal words of Faux News– “fair and balanced.” For every Harvard graduate, there are probably twenty from schools like Hillsdale, Oral Roberts and Liberty– and their graduates are the ones passing anti-gay and anti-women measures in state legislatures around the country.

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An Interesting Analogy

A reader recently sent me a New York Times subscriber newsletter by Nate Cohn that drew an analogy between the upcoming Presidential race and the election in 1948. Most of us remember that election–if we remember it at all–for the iconic picture of a victorious President Truman holding up a newspaper with the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Cohn goes through a number of ways in which the run-up to that election is strikingly similar to the run-up to this November. For example, voters were sour about the economy, despite the fact that it was doing well–his subtitle was “Americans were angry with Truman because of high prices in the aftermath of World War II, even as other economic signals looked promising.”

If there’s a time that might make sense of today’s political moment, postwar America might just be it. Many analysts today have been perplexed by public dissatisfaction with the economy, as unemployment and gross domestic product have remained strong and as inflation has slowed significantly after a steep rise. To some, public opinion and economic reality are so discordant that it requires a noneconomic explanation, sometimes called “vibes,” like the effect of social media or a pandemic hangover on the national mood.

But in the era of modern economic data, Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.

As Cohn notes, the parallels are striking, although today, inflation followed a pandemic rather than a war. But there was a great housing crisis caused by excess demand, as troops returned from overseas, not unlike the shortage of affordable housing that we are facing today. It was also a time of labor unrest–an unrest we are also experiencing. As Cohn reports,”The most severe inflation of the last 100 years wasn’t in the 1970s, but in 1947, reaching around 20 percent.”

Mr. Truman’s popularity collapsed. By spring in 1948, an election year, his approval rating had fallen to 36 percent, down from over 90 percent at the end of World War II. He fell behind the Republican Thomas Dewey in the early head-to-head polling. He was seen as in over his head. The New Republic ran a front-page editorial titled: “As a candidate for president, Harry Truman should quit.”

We’ve been hearing that refrain recently, as well.

In retrospect, it’s hard to believe voters were so frustrated. Historians generally now consider Mr. Truman one of the great presidents, and the postwar period was the beginning of the greatest economic boom in American history. By any conceivable measure, Americans were unimaginably better off than during the Great Depression a decade earlier. Unemployment remained low by any standard, and consumers kept spending. The sales of seemingly every item — appliances, cars and so on — were an order of magnitude higher than before the war.

Truman’s decision to desegregate the armed forces wasn’t exactly met with applause, either.

Again, the similarities are stunning. The essay proceeds to report the results of that year’s polling on a variety of issues, and calling the results “grim” would be a massive understatement. But Harry Truman won, and Cohn goes into considerable detail about the themes of his campaign, and why he eked out a victory.

What Cohn doesn’t address is the single biggest difference between Truman versus Dewey and the likely upcoming contest between Biden and Trump.

The 1948 campaign was waged between a successful but undervalued President and a legitimate and sane contender; the upcoming election will pit a successful and undervalued President against an ignorant, narcissistic, mentally-ill cult leader who is poses an existential threat to the Constitution, democracy and the rule of law.

Thomas Dewey was a traditional candidate with a respectable and relevant resume. He understood government, having served as Governor of New York. There was no reason to fear that his occupancy of the Oval Office would bring about chaos, introduce fascism and/or destroy the Republic. (And after the votes were counted, he didn’t claim he’d “really” won…)

Cohn’s analysis is excellent as far as it goes. What it fails to highlight is what we all know: the biggest asset Joe Biden has in the upcoming election is Donald Trump. I agree with the reported sentiment of a participant in a focus group (of Republicans!): If the contest is between Trump and Joe Biden,  I’ll vote for Biden even if he’s in a coma.

Today is Martin Luther King day. Every vote for Donald Trump is a vote to reject King’s dream.

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Listen To My Friend Morton…

As regular readers of this blog know, Morton Marcus (who comments here from time to time) is a longtime friend with whom I co-authored a recent book on women’s rights, “From Property to Partner.”

Morton also writes a statewide newspaper column, primarily focused on data about Indiana, and occasionally comparing the actual activities of our dreadful legislature with his opinions about what that body ought to be doing. A recent column was so on target, I decided to share those recommendations. (Not that our supermajority Republican legislative overlords will pay the slightest bit of attention–they’re too busy micromanaging local government, destroying public education, pandering to the gun lobby, and imposing “Christian” behavioral restrictions on Hoosiers.)

The day before yesterday, you got Gulley, today you get Marcus.

The first of Morton’s recommendations was focused on legislative operations, which is sort of “inside baseball,” but important. He advocates releasing legislators to “act without the discipline of the Caucus. Let’s make the bold assumption that our 150 elected legislators are grownups. They can make their own decisions without the dictates of a repressive party leadership fully inebriated on the power of a super-majority of automatons.”

That will happen when pigs fly–or when we elect actual grownups.

Morton’s second recommendation–passage of independent redistricting– hits at the very center of Indiana’s continuing dysfunctions. Getting rid of gerrymandering would allow voters to choose their representatives; now, as sentient Hoosiers know, those representatives choose their voters. Gerrymandering is an absolutely wonderful mechanism for vote suppression–if your vote isn’t going to count, why cast it?

Morton also points out that an independent redistricting process would “likely rationalize districts such that two adjacent House districts would constitute one Senate district. No House districts would be divided.” As he notes, “Currently the Senate and the House district maps are independent of each other. It affords chaos and cover for the ambitions of individuals who seek lifetime membership in the General Assembly.”

His third recommendation hits on something else I’ve long advocated (there’s a reason we’ve been friends so long; we have similar, albeit not always congruent, views on the issues). He advocates adoption of the Maine Electoral College allocation rules.

Now the winner of the popular vote in Indiana gets all of the electoral votes in a presidential election. Under the system used in Maine, a notoriously left-wing coastal state, the winner of the statewide popular vote gets two electoral votes. The winner of each congressional district gets the one electoral vote of that district. No Constitutional amendment is needed for this move toward a more equitable system.

In 2020, instead of all 11 Indiana electoral votes going to the Repulsive candidate, that person would have received nine electoral votes and two such votes would have gone to the party that is Bidin’ its time.

(My apologies to those unfamiliar with the Gershwin songbook and who know only Taylor Swift lyrics.)

Morton also wants legislative study committees that would consider legislation reducing the number of townships in each county, and the number of counties in the states. (There are 92 counties in Indiana, in case you are wondering; California–somewhat larger– has 58).

 Why should Warren, Fountain, Parke and Vermillion not be joined into one or two counties? Perhaps Jasper and Newton counties should be returned to their former singularity. Let’s not neglect Blackford with Jay, Ohio with Dearborn or Switzerland.

I would miss the detailed data on each separate area, but my fetish is not the concern of the state. Likewise, cost cutting should not be the dominant objective, but rather improving service to citizens in line with the structure of society in the 21st century rather than the 19th century.

This last recommendation recalls that of the bipartisan Kernan-Shepard Commission, convened by then-Governor Mitch Daniels, that examined the operations of Indiana government and recommended merging or otherwise eliminating a number of the 1008 townships that each pay township boards and trustees and the expenses of trustee offices–artifacts of a time when reaching the county seat via horseback took half a day. As I wrote back in 2011, the Commission had the temerity to suggest that–in the age of the internet and the absence of virtually all of the other tasks with which those townships had originally been tasked– we should rethink them…

As members of that Commission discovered–and as Morton, a longtime Hoosier, clearly knows–Indiana legislators don’t “re-think.” Most of the time, they don’t really think in the first place.

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