I get weary — and we should all get weary — of accusations that this or that politician wants to “tax and spend” or that it’s wrong for the government to manipulate the distribution of wealth.
Everything government does involves taxing and spending and those two acts, perforce, redistribute wealth. The pertinent questions are (1) Tax whom? and (2) Spend for what?
Redistribution of wealth? The two presidents since WWII who are consensus picks for the POTUS hall of fame — Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan — -probably redistributed more wealth than their peers, albeit in different directions. Other presidents present the same choice with smaller numbers: Robin Hood or reverse Robin Hood?
Robin Hood was a thief and famous for calling out the abuse of taxing and spending powers by the government of Prince John acting as regent in the absence of King Richard. Robin Hood was outlaw but only made so by the evil Prince John, who hoped to mete out the punishment for an outlaw — death — while King Richard was still leading a Crusade.
I never understood exactly why John believed that Robin Hood was the only loyal subject who could rat him out to King Richard, but I guess this was an early instance of a proverb that sometimes was the only explanation for what I saw as a criminal court judge:
Nobody ever said criminals were smart.
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Criminals are, however, attracted to what Kurt Vonnegut called in another context, “the Money River,” showing up along the banks with empty buckets looking for an opportunity to dip into what appears to be free money because nobody appears to be watching it. When the Money River nears flood stage, it’s often caused by government having to respond to a legitimate problem at warp speed, so that customary safeguards are not in place.
(Russell digression ™ I’m no longer a judge now, but just another retired geezer living in an age-restricted subdivision. Working in and teaching criminal justice taught me that the folklore about criminality as a racial trait is nonsense, but violent crime does arise and subside according to the life cycles of criminals, beginning in late teens. By the time an experienced violent criminal is old enough to buy into my neighborhood at age 55, his most productive years have been trending down steeply for some time.
By “productive,” I mean of criminal homicide, robbery, rape and other serious assaults. My use of the masculine pronoun to describe violent criminals is not merely a surrender to conventional grammar. Perpetrators of the most violent crimes are likely to be male.
I have one more observation about the raw numbers used to “prove” black and brown people to be more inclined to crime than white people. If you slap those numbers on a line graph and do the same with victims of violent crime, the curves produced by perpetrators and victims look remarkably similar.
If people in predominantly minority neighborhoods are less likely to summon the police for help, less likely to identify as a witness and more likely to disregard a subpoena or a jury summons, they are not disrespecting law enforcement. They are responding in a rational manner to a history of law enforcement disrespecting them. The way to enforce the law around that history is not rocket science, but it will take a long time make things level and then get the word out.
When I was a full-time judge, it was part of my writ to snuff out racial bias in a system for which laws are written by folks who do not believe racial bias is a serious problem. Where do I get that idea? From watching committee hearings in the legislature about hate crimes while waiting to testify.
I am personally opposed to hate crimes laws, but I never had that question put to me, so I answered the ones that were about why I’m so sure that the criminal justice deck is stacked against minorities even when I’m playing the role of dealer.
Y’know, the answer to every social problem is not “There oughta be a law” and even when it is, I’m not clear why that means a criminal law. Did you ever notice how effective the Southern Poverty Law Center was against the KKK on the civil side of the docket?)
As usual, I digress. Back when I jumped the rails, I had just observed that the Money River responds to political tides. Some obvious things follow from this, but they are observations of a size that makes them hard for one person or a small group to apply.
One-party government is a bad idea. There is nobody to watch all those empty buckets.
A free press with an aggressive understanding of its role is as important to good government as any formal part of that government. Without a light shining, you might hear slurping sounds but you will have no idea who is dipping their bucket.
Both the free press and the out-of-power party have a duty to preserve institutional memory. People who divert money from a public purpose to their own accounts tend to repeat the behavior until caught and punished.
Vonnegut’s remark about those born with knowledge of the Money River smacks of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that the rich are different.
They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
Let Fitzgerald and Vonnegut be correct, does that qualify the rich to govern or is the alleged difference simply what Ernest Hemingway is said to have observed about the differentness of the rich:
Yes, they have more money.
If Jesse Unruh’s claim that “money is the mother’s milk of politics” were strictly true, we would be governed by the rich. Those of us who have stood for office know that, while Unruh had a point, the fact is that you need only X amount of money to be competitive. The value of X depends on the expectations of the electorate and the candidate’s ability to raise an army of volunteers and spend wisely, abilities as useful for governing as for running.
The nonsense that says taxing and spending is wrong except for programs that benefit me has a practical use in that frugality is a value too often honored in the breach because the Money River gets to be viewed as a natural resource when the taxation headwaters are too divided from the spending deltas.
In the continuing political war, “waste, fraud and abuse” gets to be a mantra chanted over an appropriation package that needs to be smaller. Nobody wants to be on the side of waste, fraud and abuse and when the government release into the Money River is measured in trillions, who could claim the spillage will be trivial? Whether the rapids contain Jacksons or Tubmans, our ATMs will be disgorging them too far upstream to reach the problems that got them wet in the first place.
It’s the sticky fingers of the working class that draw congressional attention, the fingers of people who are happy to fill their buckets with twenties when, before the crisis, they had no buckets. This is larceny that can’t be reached by bans on cost-plus contracts and no-bid contracts or other methods of — as we say in the technical language of the trade — ripping off the taxpayers.
In both the appropriating and the ripping off, it’s fair to question whether the attitudes toward money inherited with the trust fund stand in the way of frugality with public funds. And then, of course, how to understand a candidate’s attitude toward money before the election. For example, is a Republican certain JFK was kidding when he told the Gridiron Club about a telegram he received from his wealthy father:
Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.
Donald John Trump, a prince of the New York City real estate business who inherited his father’s kingdom, invited a test of the claim that the extremely wealthy, the modern royals who have been dubbed with a political sobriquet — the One Percent — would govern more honestly because they have no reason to steal.
(Russell digression ™ The class of people called the One Percent are closer to the One-Tenth of One Percent as wealth in the U.S. continues to concentrate in a society losing social mobility on account of public policies since President Reagan undertook to dismantle the New Deal. “One Percenters” were demonized by the Occupy Wall Street movement because it made a snappier slogan than the fiscal reality of wealth concentration.
When I style Mr. Trump to be a prince, I am taking him at his word.
As I wait for the laughter to subside in the cheap seats, I must explain that we really don’t know if Mr. Trump is a billionaire because he successfully resisted the custom of candidates for president releasing their tax returns, but we do know that his upbringing conforms to the description offered by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was raised as class royalty and claims to be class royalty. I decided that taking his claims at face value should yield a narrative that is somewhat amusing and not entirely irrelevant. I leave it up to readers to weigh the fact that JFK’s remark about his family wealth was amusing on purpose.)
Mr. Trump set up his presidency as a social experiment nicely when he promised that his campaign would be “self-funded” so his attention could not be bought with large contributions.
Limited to candidates who got more than a million bucks in their political kitties (amount listed next to name) for the 2020 primaries, FEC reports show (listed in order of the amount of “self-funding,” which includes money lent to one’s own campaign), the following percentages in relation to the total amount raised. “Small contributions” are under $200.
Michael Bloomberg, ($126,738,403), 99% self-funded, less than 1% individual contributions, of which 84% were small.
Pete Buttigieg, ($1,190,917), 47% self-funded, 53% individual contributions, of which 46% were small.
Elizabeth Warren, ($5,963,127), 17% self-funded, 83% individual contributions, of which 53% were small.
Bernie Sanders, ($32,957,437), 1% self-funded, 99% individual contributions, of which 48% were small.
Donald Trump, ($13,635,668), 1% self-funded, 48% individual contributions, of which 42% were small.
Joe Biden, ($46,741,037), less than 1% self-funded, 100% individual contributions, since no other source exceeded 1%, of which 42 % were small.
Just for grins, I ranked the same top money raisers by percent raised from Political Action Committees (rounding means adding all percentages may not equal 100):
Donald Trump, 52%
Michael Bloomberg, 1%
Biden and Buttigieg got less than 1% of their money from PACs.
Warren and Sanders got zero from PACs.
Mr. Trump’s promise to self-fund got an early spot on the shelf that would collect evidence for the Trump entry in future political science texts: Post-Truth Politics. His royal status continued to follow him, though, after he won the primary and a four-year lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Early on, he complained about the elderly White House compared to the modernity of Trump Tower. According to Newsweek, we the people spent $1.75 million to render the historic mansion fit for the Trumps. He said it had mice.
Russell digression: In my semi-informed opinion, people living in a house of that age and size and construction are going to have mice unless they deploy a lot of poison or keep cats. When I taught at the University of Texas — San Antonio, we lived in a 250-year-old log cabin and we had a substantial mouse problem until we visited a shelter and came away with a pair of cats.
The boss of the mouse detail was a big white polydactyl tomcat we called Fox. His female litter mate got named Dana. The reason for Dana’s name is like whether Donald Trump pays income taxes: the truth is out there.)
Mr. Trump also compared his private airplane — he called it Trump Force One — with Air Force One, and found the government wings lacking. He was unable to travel in his preferred vehicle because of the sophisticated communication gear and countermeasures to certain methods of attack built into Air Force One. He might have been disappointed anyway, because there would be no Trump Force One — Air Force One is not really an airplane, but a call sign for whatever aircraft has the president on board.
Trump Force One was classy. He acquired the Boeing 757 from another corporate prince and had it redecorated. Stock, it would carry 228 passengers. When The Donald was done, it could carry 43…but they sat on cream-colored leather seats with gold-plated seat belt buckles.
I used the past tense because, last week, CNN reported finding Trump Force One at a small airport in Orange County, New York. Records showed it had not been flown since Joe Biden, the Pretender, was inaugurated. One engine was missing and the other shrink-wrapped in plastic.
Experts consulted by CNN estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars to render it airworthy again unless the missing engine had to be replaced. That would cost a cool million by itself. Trump Force One cost $15,000-$18,000 an hour to fly. He is currently reduced to flying in his 1997 Cessna, which flies for a mere $5,000 an hour but only carries eight and does not have room on the fuselage for the Trump name in a suitable size.
If Mr. Trump does not repair Trump Force One soon, it will be unsafe to fly. The weather where he has parked is too wet, and the water will weaken the metal in ways hard to detect. This is why the USAF mothballs planes at Davis-Monthan AFB, in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson. Tours are available from the Pima Air and Space Museum. Last time I was there, a public road still ran close enough that we tourists could see the aircraft the USAF is saving in case an hour of need arises.
When it became clear that Mr. Trump would be running against Joe Biden, one of the earliest attack lines was that Mr. Biden is too old for such a high stress position. It did not catch on, but lately it is being recycled.
It is a high stress position. George W. Bush and Barack Obama were both sworn in as young men. Both left office with gray hair and wrinkles as their wives sighed in relief.
Donald John Trump has mothballed himself in Florida at Mar-a-Lago, where he keeps in shape on the golf course in case the country should have an hour of need. He lives to serve, excepting in the military.
If there is anything he does better than make deals, it’s managing money.
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Previously Published on Medium
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