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Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Paul Street at Apr 15, 2005

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It's tax day. So let's say you are paying Uncle Sam $1,000. This is how your expenditure will be used: $299.68 will go the military. $202.74 goes to health care: all health spending by the federal government, including federal spending on Medicare. [As Paul Krugman noted in the New York Times, US governmental health expenditures are actually (per-capita) higher than those of some nations with national health insurance plans (including France and Germany), thanks to a number of factors: relatively high doctor salaries, skyrocketning drug prices in the US (where there is very little coutnerveiling consumer power against he price-setting capacity of Big Pharma), and out-control paper work and bureaucratic bloat in the American corporate "health" sector]. $186.03 will go to pay interest on the debt (which costs the nation $317.3 billion each year)....to pay off domestic and international bond holders/global finance capital. $65.82 goes to income security, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Spplementary Security Income, and various programs for families and kids. $36.70 goes to education: all federal expenduitures on elementary, secondary, higher education and federal research and general education assistance. $34.38 to benefits for veterans. $26.89 to nutrition spending: including Food Stamps and all child nutrition programs $21.44 to housing: all federal housing assistance. $17.25 to environmental protection. $9.37 to job training. $105.15 to all other. For these breakdowns, please see the web site of the National Priorities Project: www.nationalpriorities.org/taxes/IncomeTaxChart05.html. "Defense" (empire) outweighs education by more than 8 to 1; income security by more than 4.5 to 1; nutrition by more than 11 to 1; housing by 14 to 1; and job training by 32 to 1. This is a snapshot of how your tax dollar breaks down in the industrialized world's most unequal nation, where the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the wealth, where black net worth is one tenth of white net worth, and where 40 million persons languished beneath the federal government's notoriously low poverty level ($14,680 for a family of three in 2003) by 2003 (see www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/002484.html). In 15 of my home city Chicago's 77 officially designated Community Areas in 1999 --- at the peak of the long Clinton boom ---- more than 54 percent of the children lived below that inadequate poverty measure. There were 15 Chicago Community Areas where at least 25 percent of the children lived in what researchers call "deep poverty": less than half of the poverty level. Things got considerably worse in these predominantly black neighborhoods after the onset of the Clinton-Bush recession and subsequent weak "recovery," which increased the number of Americans without health insurance to 45 million by 2003 (see http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty03.html). By 2002, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, less than half of the adult black population in Chicago was attached to the labor market (See Street, Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy, and the State of Black Chicago [Chicago, IL, April 2005]. pp. 37-52). Nearly 40 years ago, in the midst of his campaign for economic and social justice in Chicago and the nation, Martin Luther King. Jr. called for "a radical reordering of our national priorities," noting that the cost of the nation's vicious attack on Southeast Asia was "hurting us in all our programs to end slums and to end segregation in schools and...to end the long night of poverty." King was starting to make regular and repeated connections between what he called the "triple" and "interrelated" "evils" of militarism/empire, poverty/capitalism, and racism. He called repeatedly for "a radical redistribution of political and economic power" and "a revolution of values and other things" that would seek a society that was "more person-centered than property- and profit-centered." "Something is wrong with capitalism," the democratic-socialist King told his colleagues at the Southern Christian Leadership Council. "With the resources accruing from the termination of the war, arms race, and excessive space races," King told the US Senate in late 1966, "the elimination of all poverty could become an immediate national reality. At present, the war on poverty is not even a battle, it is scarcely a skirmish." See David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council (1999), pp. 533-564 The single-party right wing Republican American federal state is not shrinking; the problem is that it's tilted to the right and that it values war and empire over basic social and human needs even within the imperial homeland. But then King was talking about the same perversion of national priorities at the height of the New Deal order....the peak of Democratic Party dominance in federal government.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Apr 22, 2005 22:16 PM
On rich nations exploiting poor nations, "you can" only "investigate and report." I gave some examples of typical injustices and how someone might want to fight them. I did not say you can "only" investigate and report. My point is simply that capitalism is not the source of all injustice (not even a major source, in my opinion). There are many other causes of injustice and it is a mistake to focus solely on capitalism. Human society, as well as all of nature, involves competition as well as cooperation, status hierarchies as well as comradery. All social animals have rules, structure, division of labor, status differentials, to some degree. If you can't tolerate any amount of authority or competition, you have to move to a different planet, or maybe a different universe. I can understand wanting to minimize injustice whenever possible, but I can't understand raging at nature.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Street, Paul at Apr 21, 2005 22:23 PM
Again and again realpc misrepresents. Nobody here said all unfairness would be abolished once capitalism is transcended. That's a straw dog and a silly one at that. His infantile naturalizing of the extreme socially constructed, institutionally enforced, and ideologically legitimated inequalities of modern classism/racism/ sexism etc. is perfect and pedagogically useful. That says it all. Forget about what MLK called for - "the radical restructuring of the nation's priorities" (along postcapitalist lines BTW)- because, well because wolves eat the baby bunnies and mountain lions lunch on Bambi. Not too big a leap from that little analogy to straight out Social Darwinism. Then then he says you "can" (and he seem to think you should) help people fight some specific injustices in your immediate workplace and community. Unfairness in promotions for woman and minorites in your workplace...ok you can work on that. The class structure that structures promotions and the lack thereof...uhhh...that would apparently be the natural order of things and supposedly lacks identifiable villain(s). On rich nations exploiting poor nations, "you can" only "investigate and report." What muddled nonsense! "realpc" is an ongoing tutorial in the absurdity of the antiradical mindset. I seen no other reason for him to inhabit this comments section, which is on the explicitly leftist/antitcapitalist ZNet dime and not in fact some sort of monument to the First Amendment

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Apr 21, 2005 17:53 PM
I would never criticize someone for fighting injustice. I am criticizing the simple-minded idea that there is an identifiable villain at the root of all or most injustice. Injustice is found throughout the natural world -- is it fair when a predator steals a baby rabbit from its mother? We cannot eradicate the sort of injustice that goes along with living on earth. But if you see a sexual predator making off with your neighbor's child, you must fight the injustice and save the child. Likewise, if you notice the law is soft on certain crimes, you can fight injustice by creating public awareness and trying to change the law. Or if you notice that women and blacks can't get promotions at your workplace, you can help them fight the injustice. Or if you perceive that your country is ripping off a poor nation, you can investigate and report. But you cannot eradicate all unfairness by eliminating capitalism. That is your false belief. Each type of injustice must be confronted, and there never will be an all-purpose solution.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Street, Paul at Apr 20, 2005 20:57 PM
No I never wonder why. All I have to do is watch television, read the newspapers, survey the media, listen to the commentary of most policymakers and educators, break down the content of it all and then make the common sense connections between the content and the ownership and control of dominant ("mainstream") communications and the policy and educational structures. The literature on how this all works is vast and fairly impressive. Your initial question is incredibly naive. The really amazing thing is how many people (not you but quite a few others) manage to resist the remarkable amount of elite/corporate thought control that pollutes US culture to maintain a good and decent grasp of the basic difficult social and political realities (which you obscenely trivialize as "nasty and unfair things" that "happen in the world") that Martin Luther King Jr. opposed and which you essentially defend and support. Your "Star Wars syndrome" comment is insulting but typical of your counter-productive record on this blog. I encourage you to quit plaguing this and other ZNet blogs.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Apr 20, 2005 20:05 PM
Paul, Have you ever wondered why so many of us do not "know" the same "truth?" Are we all stupid or living in fantasy? I realize that all kinds of nasty and unfair things happen in this world. I do not agree with you that something called "The Corporation" is the cause. You are an example of what I call the "Star Wars syndrome." This is the very attractive belief, portrayed in fiction and myth for millenia, that we can join up with the good guys and fight against the bad guys. I know it's hard to break free of the syndrome and confront the real world of chaos and complexity. But it's worth it if you want to escape the matrix of 19th c. reductionism and get a glimpse of real (relative) truth. Seeing the complexity does not necessarily result in despair, although it does result in increased humility.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Street, Paul at Apr 20, 2005 18:00 PM
Christ...whatever. I am arrogant enough to think I know that the nation's priorities are hideously twisted in the interests of the wealthy few, that this perversion is very much about the inherent concentration of wealth and power that takes place under the rule of The Corporation, and that the American educational system does quite a bit to reinforce that concentrattion and remarkably little to undermine it, quite contrary to the declared goals of such great American educational philosophers as Thomas Jeffferson and John Dewey. Look at me, I think I'm superior because I know all this and lots of other stuff too.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Apr 18, 2005 14:31 PM
I guess it's been such a long time since I believed in the possibility of anyone knowing the "truth." Maybe I'm so used to being a postmodernist (whatever that is) I forgot that most people aren't. Thinking "I know the truth and the other guys don't, ha ha" results from the very typical human need to feel superior. Racism used to satisfy that need for lots of Americans, but racism is out of style. Now it's knowing the "truth," or being more intelligent.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Apr 17, 2005 22:30 PM
"we who know and care about the truth" As opposed to we who don't know the truth and wouldn't care about it if we did?

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Cryofan, Cryofan at Apr 17, 2005 20:13 PM
Yep, education is what is needed. It is sad how little we Americans know about how our jointly owned property, America, is operated. But this sort of education will never be promulgated through the mass media, at least not as it is structured currently. THere are so many excellent ideas and approaches to educating the public about taxation that cannot be implemented because the public cannot be reached, some of which are mentioned here on this thread. But all of this is practically moot. The communication channels are owned and operated by those whose interests are being served by the taxation-spending status quo. And we who know and care about the truth lack the critical mass to bypass or subvert these channels. Well, this area is also one aspect of the video documentary I am working on. Someone mentioned comparisons of American and West European taxes and spending. I have some good documentation on that, and am currently working on learning how to use flash animation to display charts and text and diagrams to explain how America compares to the social democracies, financially--where the money goes, tax rates, social benefits, etc. It is a long and somewhat tedious task.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Jautter, Mind at Apr 17, 2005 18:58 PM
Bwong-"Being smarter doesn't have to translate to greater power over others."- In a right wing op-ed I read a few days ago,the guy was complaining because over 70% of university and college profs were "left wing liberals"[are there right wing?].It's as if this highly syndicated moron thinks left or right is a choice to be made without letting the muddling,confusing factor of intelligent thought affect your decision. It's obvious, looking at our current leadership,that power has nothing to do with smarts.You are correct.

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By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Apr 17, 2005 01:29 AM
Learning is enjoyable, but it also incidentally increases your social status. Long before capitalism learning and wisdom were marks of status. I do not believe in equality as a goal, since I am not a leftist. My point is that lefists, who value equality, should want everyone to stay dumb.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Gammon101, Bwong at Apr 16, 2005 23:24 PM
But to be fair, I should mention that because of the esoteric nature of my subject our graduate classes are typically very small, 10-15 people max. On the other hand, one section of psy101 typically has about 1000 people, their lectures are held in a big auditorium with the professor doing powerpoint presentations. In cases like that I don't think you lose anything if you opt for canned lectures and on line learning instead I disagree with your premise that education is intrinsically about social climbing. This is a distortion under capitalism and says nothing about the value of knowledge for its own sake. I don't think people who major in history really are motivated by the prospect of getting rich(even if they are not radicals like Paul) Your point that education is intriniscally unequal by making some people "smarter" is plain dumb. Being "smarter" doesn't have to translate to greater power over others. This is a feature of hiarichal society. At other times physical powess would put one in charge. Certainly leftists do not object to physical exercises. Even under capitalism the process can be made more equitable by improving access. PS It not even true that under the current system you're ahead if you're "smarter", whether intrinscally(somehow) or in terms of level of education. I for one don't think lawyers,accountants and MBAs are "smarter". They aren't evn very well educated.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Apr 16, 2005 22:55 PM
I don't share your opinion of lectures and professors bwong, but if I did we would still not have an answer to the problem. Education -- considered the best way to climb the class ladder -- is becoming increasingly hard to afford. Now leftists should really oppose education altogether since it promotes inequality by making some people smarter (in specific areas), and therefore more valued, than others. But whether you like or dislike education, what can be done about the ridiculous price tag? I think the internet will gradually replace the lecture halls. Your tests were written and graded by graduate students anyway, so the professors are not doing quality assurance. Better education systems can be designed using technology, at least for those who don't want to go into debt for the rest of their lives.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Gammon101, Bwong at Apr 16, 2005 22:40 PM
Learning experience is not just filling your brain with information. "Live performance" is not only more entertaining,--which seems to be your point,--it also engages the audience in ways that canned lectures and books can't. For one thing you can't interrupt a vedeo or a DVD presentation to ask questions. The teachers also need feed back from the students to adjust his/her pace. Maybe some points need further explanations, some steps can be skipped or sped up, etc. Some of best lectures I have been to are unplanned. Someone asked a particularly insightful question and the lecturers went off some unplanned tangent before picking up original thread again. In the process the lecture was enriched. Another things I find useful in lectures which I haven't brought up is that very often I want to learn something new which is not directly related to my own research, but interesting nevertheless.You may want more than just a pedestrian understanding but you don't want to start a second research project. A lecture course is ideal. It gives you more information and details than you'd get from popular presentations and survey papers(actually some good survey papers are technically demanding too) but does not require the background knolwedge taken for granted in seminar talks.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Apr 16, 2005 19:24 PM
I agree that people who can explain and summarize complex subjects and make them accessible are doing a great service. I have read many books by that kind of person. I almost never had a professor who even tried to do that. People who have this talent can benefit students more by writing books and making videos. The lecture hall is a holdover from the middle ages. Yes a live performance is usually preferred, but is it worth the extravagant cost?

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Gammon101, Bwong at Apr 16, 2005 18:12 PM
I find good lectures immensely helpful and very enjoyable even for things that I know already. In fact I would say lectures are most useful if you already know a bit. The lecturer may fill the gaps in my knowledge which I didn't notice before. (s)he may point out connections to other things that I am not aware of or highlight the key points and directions for further development.Sometimes it is very useful just to see someone presenting things in a conceptually cleaner, nore coherent way because that helps enormously in enhancing my understanding. But like I said, it depends a lot on your field. I can certainly understand that lectures may not be very useful for subjects like history or pehaps lingistics(according to you), though I think it would be impolite to say such a thing to a historian or linguist, not being one myself.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Gammon101, Bwong at Apr 16, 2005 17:48 PM
Realpc, A good teacher rarely just lecture from text books. I don't know what your field is like. But in mine a lot of papers are not so accessibe to the begining students(abstracts help a bit, not they still sound like greek for the unitiated). If you were to try to pick up the background on your own it would take years before you can read a non trivial paper(in fact there are graduate courses based on one or several papers. A good portion on the course is spent on building up the technical knowledge base, which are taken for granted by the authors of these papers). A good teacher does not only tell you the information. More importantly he/she provides a narrative(yes, even in science) and points you to the direction where you should look. A summary of the relevant background is invaluable because it save you the time to have to dig through the mountain of literature and get you to the point where you can reserach on your own. I should point out that in mathematics and science it takes a while for an uninitiated students to even understand a definition or acquire the skill to do a calculation.Knowing what information to bypass is often as important. It's not like in the humanities where you can just pick up a random paper and read on your own. However, I do think a lot of lower level undergraduate lectures(on standard text book material) can be dispensed with.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Apr 16, 2005 15:25 PM
Bwong, was it really useful to have these professors lecturing to a crowd of adoring students? If they were actually productive researchers you could access their papers directly. I do not exactly agree with Paul Street about education. I think the education system needs to be re-designed for the 21st century (it hasn't changed much since the middle ages). But I do not think education ever will, or ever could, promote equality. Its purpose is exactly the opposite -- to give people a chance to acquire and demonstrate specialized and superior knowledge and skills. There is nothing wrong with that. I did aquire valuable knowledge through the process, by reading, not directly from the professors. I proved I learned something by passing the courses and requirements.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Gammon101, Bwong at Apr 16, 2005 04:41 AM
I have nothing but good things to say about my tenured professors. I have seen none of what realpc and Paul describe.In fact exactly the opposite is true. Many of my professors are world renowed researchers.They are hard working and enthusiastic. Many exhibit remarkably broad knowledge in related fields. Guess that depends on the school and the field one works in.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Jautter, Mind at Apr 16, 2005 02:32 AM
The one breakdown I'd like to see is how much of that $1,000 went toward faith based sacraficial bull shit causes,besides defense. Seperation of church and state, as defined in our constitution, surely would allow me to deduct that proportion from my bill.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Street, Paul at Apr 16, 2005 02:24 AM
Tiana5 I think you have a good point about what the educational system tends to do to folks who come in with idealistic and egaltiarian aspirations. I was in and around the higher educational racket (realpc and I agree on something) for some time (and witnessed savage abuse of tenure, by the way...countless drunken,useless, depressed, boring, lazy, unproductive professors). I went to grad school with zillions of many-sided idealistic leftists and they just faded away with age and tenure....got professionalized and comfortably innocuous. I could not find a voice and start publishing and speaking productively until I got out of the stultifying group-think imposed by dissertation committees, hiring committees, "peer-review," conference selection committees, tenure committees and also out of the morally and intellectually deadening hold of academic field specialization. You have to be not just say a historian (that's bad enough) but you can only talk about say the 19th century and then only about say labor or women's or foreign policy history....and so on. The community college folk often seem almost like idealistic social worker types (very committed and admirable) but their teaching load is a soul and mind crusher.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Apr 16, 2005 02:01 AM
The education system became a racket as soon as everyone decided college is the path to success. Education is the fastest elevator up the class ladder, so everyone is willing to pay the ridiculous price. Professors can't wait to get tenure because then they only have to work if and when they feel like it. Graduate students grade the papers and often write the test questions. The professor, who is most likely not a leader in his field, gives a lecture which basically tells you what is in the textbook, in case you don't feel like reading it. On the subject of education I guess I am a revolutionary. People can take charge of their own education and stop getting ripped off in the hope of raising their social status.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Ccollins206, Tiana5 at Apr 16, 2005 01:21 AM
Is it that professional educators have a predisposition that turns them into "servile lapdogs for concentrated power"? or is it that educators start off with ideals and ambitions about assisting in an education revolution and are just slowly beat down by the lack of respect, money, resources and restraints that leads in any profession to burn-out, disinterest and the necessity to kiss-ass to keep afloat? My experience with community college professions was quite different (and better, I think), than my experience with professors a major research institution. I felt community college professors thrived in the freedom of not having to publish, but were burnt out with continual cuts, increases in tuition, inability to gain full time status and frustrated by lack financial benefits including basic wage of living increases. I don't think that there is something about the inherit nature of those who become educators that leads to their complacency with the education system. I think it's the nature of the education system that leads to their complacency.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Street, Paul at Apr 16, 2005 00:09 AM
Yes, it would be nice if we could earmark our taxes for positive programs like say drug treatment and tuition assistance over mass arrest, incarceration, and felony marking...food over bombs for Iraqis, etc. Can we contribute only to the left hand of the state, please. I want more money for education of course but there are depressing problems with the great majority of officially certified professional educators in the US. Their training, predispositions, and world views tend to turn them into servile lapdogs for concentrated power. I think schools need more resources at all levels but we also need a revolution in the orientation of educational systems and the nature of the educators, who are poorly prepared to keep up with the deeply authoritarian pedagogical role of dominant Orwellian corporate-state media. See the work of the prolific left education theorist Henry Giroux (many books) on how authoritarian corporate media mis-educates youth in the absence of a democratic and libertaring educational system.

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Re: Taxing Reflections: National Priorities Past and Present

By Ccollins206, Tiana5 at Apr 15, 2005 22:37 PM
This is disgusting. Now I'm very envious of a friend of mine who has a pleasant gig working under the table. What bothers me most is when I hear people complaining about welfare moms living off the rest of our hard work. The stereotype of teenage moms having more kids to get more money is focused on as one of the biggest wastes of our tax dollars. I knew a good portion of my tax money went to the military, but wasn't aware that it was quite that much. It is completely infuriating--the feeling that I'm more or less forced to pay for an instituation which forces gays to the closet, which treats women like the weakest link, which punishes and isolates soldiers who seek help for mental health . . . I'll gladly pay more for education, health care, VA benefits, and the environment, and I'm okay with my money going to basic defense, but not to outrageous and unaccountable military contracts to corporations. How about a United Way tax system in which we check and allocate our tax dollars to the programs we feel are most essential to our lives(but without the United Way management skimming so much off the top)?

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