Meanwhile, in Right-Wing Bizarro World
I was arguing with someone. On the Internet. It was important enough that my comment ended up being five pages. Just one problem: That’s longer than comments are allowed to be on that site. Phail.

But I couldn’t bring myself to just delete an hour’s worth of writing, so I’m just gonna post it here instead. That way the Internet need not be deprived of my glory. Here it is:

Overhaul Social Security and Medicare. Any future recipient will have to expect less. Current recipients will receive essentially the same level of benefit, but subsequent recipients will receive a lesser share until the program is reduced to a completely catastrophic insurance program, not a retirement account.

You either do not understand what Social Security is, in which case you shouldn’t be talking, or you are ideologically opposed to its very existence, in which case you should just come out and say what you mean. The whole point of Social Security is to provide retirement, disability, and healthcare benefits to the elderly and disabled, their dependants, and survivors. It’s a pretty simple concept: If you spend your life working in America, the day will come when America works for you. When your bones are too old or your body too weak for you to earn your own keep any longer, you need not fear. The United States of America will help you. Because we are the greatest nation in the world. We take care of one another.

If you are against that on principle, then you are in favor of relegating millions of seniors and disabled people into poverty and sickness and death, all preventable. And for what? So that the government can be smaller? Great thinking, Holmes. Kinda like sawing a baby’s legs off so that it won’t get into trouble when it learns to walk. You’re on to some quality twelfth-century wisdom, there. You should write for The Economist!

I will remove all funding from programs where performance cannot be demonstrated.

Everyone would agree that, wherever money is spent, performance must be compared to expenditures. This is true whether we are talking about a family, a business, or a government.

But you seem to be going further, and implying that the government programs in question will have to meet some pretty unreasonable standards of the crassest and most short-sighted sort. Again, it strikes me as though you are concealing a more zealous anti-government disposition than you outwardly let on.

Programs that support fragmented agencies and duplication at various levels of government will be reviewed and corrected.

We can agree on that one. However, there is already the Government Accounting Office. One of the finest arms of our government, and one of the most non-partisan, the GAO consistently brings governmental inefficiencies into the light. The reason many of these inefficiencies persist afterwards is political. Lobbying groups, or opinion polls, or even conventional wisdom, persuade politicians to support spending inefficiencies because they think there is some gain to be realized by continuing the spending. Indeed, many citizens who are so upset about government spending, are some of the most ardent supporters of that spending when it comes to local projects and programs.

So your solution is misguided: What we really need is not more auditing, but a better-informed and more rationally consistent electorate. If we get that, then a more responsive Congress will follow.

Welfare will only be paid to those who show proof of citizenship and submit to a drug test prior to picking up their check each week.

You went easy on welfare. However, neither of your conditions for the disbursement of welfare checks are sensible. The xenophobia thing is kind of pointless and I won’t waste any time on that. As for the other one, I do think we have a problem when it comes to welfare money that gets blown on drugs and alcohol. It would be good to build additional accountability and oversight into welfare spending—not in the punitive sense, but in the assistive sense, so that people who aren’t spending their welfare money appropriately won’t be cut off, but will instead be firmly guided toward more appropriate spending habits.

In any case, poor judgment is no reason to kick people even further down into the gutter. Until federal programs are in place to truly give people the help they need without paying them cash, then we will have to stick with the cash. We have to keep it up. Why? Because an ethical country takes care even of its weakest and its worst. It’s not just about them. It’s about us. It’s about our national character.

(By the way, those are two separate groups, “weakest” and “worst”: Many of the people on welfare are at least as responsible, hardworking, and honorable as you or me.)

Tax breaks and sweetheart deals will be removed from the tax code.

Yes, we should definitely simplify the tax code, close loopholes, and increase enforcement.

The tax system will now be a flat tax.

Dead wrong. A flat-tax would be ruinous. Government revenues would collapse, forcing a massive contraction in spending, even as the lowest-income and lower-middle income people were paying more taxes than ever, leading to poverty and misery. It would be so bad that the entire social fabric of our country would unravel, leading to riots and civil unrest and general strikes. The wealthy have never been very good at judging how deeply they can fleece the rest of us without going too far.

Each dollar a person earns is worth less than the one that came before it. For a single person living in a city like Seattle, it is almost impossible to get by without at least twelve thousand dollars a year. That’s the bare minimum—and I would know because I was there once. It doesn’t allow for things like health or dental insurance, a car, vacations, dining out, or fancy electronic purchases. Twelve grand pays for a roof, utilities, and not quite enough food…for one person living in Seattle.

That “bare essential” money should never be taxed. For most people, including myself now, that figure would be significantly higher than twelve thousand, because for many people things like a vehicle, prescription drugs, pet food, and baby food are non-negotiable.

Beyond that, it’s okay to begin taxing people, but the general principle of each dollar earned being worth less than the one before it still holds true. People who are making a little bit more than just enough are able to introduce a modicum of comfort and luxury into their lives. That money can be taxed, but lightly. People need to be able to pursue a few basic pleasures and comforts. It makes them happier, healthier people. It makes them better citizens. It makes them more likely to have an interest in the success of their community and their country.

What it comes down to is that a number of logical income brackets present themselves, each bracket being taxed at a higher rate than the one below it. When you’re making enough money to eat out most of the time, buy fancy toys, and cavort around the globe, then you can afford to pay some serious taxes. And when you become truly rich and can afford to buy your own jet planes, you owe a debt of gratitude to the nation that made it possible for you to succeed, and that gratitude is repaid in taxes, as well as civil and charitable commitments. (But I digress.)

I don’t expect you to agree with me, but paying taxes is patriotic. It is a symbol of your success as an American, and your investment in this country’s continued success. People who can afford to pay very high taxes are quite fortunate, and are no worse off materially for paying those taxes, notwithstanding a few less silver spoons in the china cabinet.

Capital gains will be reduced to assist with rebuilding our investment base.

Economic conservatives—the same good folks who brought us the current financial crisis—have long insisted that corporate welfare is as good a thing as individual welfare is bad. There is some truth to the notion that capital gains taxes should be low enough so as not to stifle investment. However, a “low enough” rate can still be quite high, and in this case it probably should be. Capital gains (for those of you who don’t know) are the profits made by reselling an asset for more than you originally paid for it. From a bird’s eye point of view, the transaction itself is what grows the economy. The profit from that transaction is secondary. In fact, too much profit is actually a loss for the economy. This is why ordinary Americans have seen no improvement in their wages or standard of living in the past thirty years, even though the overall economy has grown: All of that new wealth went to the upper class, and it never did trickle down. That wealth is effectively lost to rest of us.

The best tax policy on capital gains would allow people to draw a meaningful profit on their sale of assets while also drawing a significant tax revenue from them, which can then be invested back into the nation at large. Capital gains taxes right now are far too low, and, again, the tax bracket model needs to more progressive, so that smaller gains are taxes more lightly than larger gains. That’s just good sense.

Budget reviews will be Zero base, no automatic funding for any program or service. Managers will be required to demonstrate improvements each year. Metrics for quality, cost and delivery will be implemented and the funding for these programs will be determined by these measures.

You are implying that government spending is inherently wasteful and should be evaluated all the time. First of all, without regard to whether said spending actually is inherently wasteful or not, the kind of oversight you are talking about would, itself, constitute a huge expense. Basically you’re saying that everyone receiving government money should have someone else (also paid for by the government) looking over their shoulder. That’s extravagant, and counterproductive. I touched on this back when I mentioned the GAO, but I didn’t give a very specific answer. Here’s one: What we really need, in order to help ensure that public money spent for a given purpose is effectively and efficiently carrying out that purpose, is more governmental transparency, database consolidation and intercommunication, public activism and watchdogging, and more end-user control of how government money is spent.

That last one is crucial. The other ones are easy to understand. This one is not, but here’s the explanation: Oftentimes, when the federal government spends money on something, the way in which that money can be spent is very strictly controlled. This leads to some very bad spending. For instance, in high school my science classrooms were falling apart. Then my school got a huge government technology grant. But that grant had to be spent in a very specific way. So you know what happened? Each science classroom got a big-screen TV. We didn’t get new lab equipment or chemicals. We didn’t get new desks or books. We certainly didn’t get a new science wing. No, the classrooms were still falling apart. But at least we had big-screen TVs…which we used maybe a dozen times in the course of the year. And those TVs were pre-HD, mind you, so they’re not all that valuable anymore.

People and organizations receiving government money need to have more control over how they can spend it. This freedom must come with limits, but it needs to be there in order for government spending to become truly more efficient.

Now, as to whether government spending is inherently wasteful or not, I admit that my big-screen TV example is not a helpful one. However, the bigger picture is more promising: Government, unlike the private sector, is not constrained by the need for profits or by the whims of shareholders. Government is able to define value more wisely than Wall Street does. This is why most fundamental technological innovation in the past century has come from the government itself or from government-funded organizations. This is why most gains in healthcare, civil rights, and the environment have originated from, and are encouraged or even enforced by, the government.

Government spending is only truly wasteful when that money costs more than it earns. It can be hard to measure on a human scale, but if you look at where America has been over the past century, I think you would have to agree that our government has done more on our behalf than against it. In that time, the government has given us female emancipation, clean water, high-speed roads, and the Internet. All of those gains came at a price, paid by taxpayers, but no one can question that their value is far greater.

So rather than forcing every government dollar to justify itself every year, all we really need to do is strengthen current oversight, open the doors and windows of transparency, encourage citizens to peek in there every so often, and give recipients of government funding more control over how to spend that money. So long as we do this, it doesn’t matter if overall government spending goes up or down, because we will know that that spending is more likely to be useful and effective, even if not by Wall Street’s foolish standards.

A balanced budget amendment is essential

I don’t know about that. We definitely can’t afford Reagan- or Bush-style deficits. On the other hand, smaller deficits over a shorter term can be very helpful in stabilizing the economy during rough periods. Also, this nation definitely needs to be able to spend freely in the event of a genuine emergency. A balanced budget amendment seems far too crude to deal with any of this stuff.

Instead, I think I’d like to see a law—not an amendment—that mandates that we prioritize paying down the national debt and keeping it below a sustainable ceiling. These ceilings already exist: Congress has to pass legislation raising them every year or so. All we need now is an enforceable legal mandate to get the debt under control. Congress will have to work this out for itself, and hopefully the Democrats can sustain their populist tone by committing themselves to fiscal responsibility, liberal-style—with a focus on curbing corporate abuses, criminalizing upward wealth capture, expanding the middle class at both ends, tightening defense spending, establishing a cost-effective universal healthcare system, modernizing entitlement programs, and providing aid to the needy.

For starters.

... I might actually consider voting for him.

So, you’re saying that you would consider voting for Obama only if he went insane.