With apologies to Dean Swift

There is a paradox at the heart of the Democrats’ attempts to combat Trump’s self-declared power. When he claimed the biggest crowd ever at his inauguration and announced that eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence to the contrary were fake news he was previewing his future behavior. Reality and truth were to be irrelevant. This presented his followers with a difficult choice : they would have to either follow or defect. (Or be dumped.) McConnell and Ryan and the Republican Senate chose to follow, at the price of their honor and self-respect. The prospect of tying themselves securely to the powerful Trumpian coat tails was too tempting. A few respected civil servants did stick it out briefly before they chose to defect (Mattis, Tillerson, Sessions). The dumped included Christie, the Donald’s most experienced and effective political manager. Reality or honesty played no part in any of the ‘remain’ decisions. The Godfather was making it clear to the world that facts would no longer count for the duration of his reign. You played by his rules or you were out of the game.

We Democrats, with our heads firmly stuck in the sands of the past, nevertheless put enormous effort into showing up each of his lies on the theory that an accurate accounting could shame the jellyfish and educate the ignorant. (How much time and money has the Times spent on fact-checking? How much is it still spending?) Albert Einstein had words for that years ago : “Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result is a definition of insanity.” We were wasting our time and our money on an outdated vision of truth long ago rejected by Trump and his resentful and angry troops.

Most of us have, I think, now finally begun to accept this picture. No amount of fact-checking is going to have the slightest effect on the Trumpists. They are explicitly scornful of facts. So why should we waste more money on it? Who cares? Only we Democrats, and the Democrats can’t control the Congress so long as McConnell stands in the doorway of the schoolhouse with his fungo bat, knocking proposals away like so many practice flies. What can we do that might change Republican minds?

In an effort to mine political history for an answer to that question, I turned to David Hume, my old college friend who explained so much to me when I was learning at the feet of my elders. I found the pertinent sections in a book he wrote shortly before the American Revolution : An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.

He laid it out right from the opening pages, in his comma- and semicolon-sprinkled, but always pointed prose. I quote :

Disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome, except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in inforcing sophistry and falsehood. And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.

But in order to make any practical use of this insight, we have to agree on the meaning of the phrase ‘sounder principles’. Sounder according to what standards? How are sound principles to be distinguished from unsound principles? Are there principles that are fixed and unchanging across national, ethnic, chronological, religious, and personal boundaries, or are they subject to redefinition according to circumstance, location, and leader? Here we come to the second part of Hume’s title — Morals. He deals with it as follows :

Those who have denied the reality of moral distinctions, may be ranked among the disingenuous disputants; nor is it conceivable, that any human creature could ever seriously believe, that all characters and actions were alike entitled to the affection and regard of everyone. The difference, which nature has placed between one man and another, is so wide, and this difference is still so much farther widened, by education, example, and habit, that, where the opposite extremes come at once under our apprehension, there is no scepticism so scrupulous, and scarce any assurance so determined, as absolutely to deny all distinction between them. Let a man’s insensibility be ever so great, he must often be touched with the images of Right and Wrong; and let his prejudices be ever so obstinate, he must observe, that others are susceptible of like impressions. The only way, therefore, of converting an antagonist of this kind, is to leave him to himself. For, finding that nobody keeps up the controversy with him, it is probable he will, at last, of himself, from mere weariness, come over to the side of common sense and reason.

Here I think Hume, while he may be right, is of no use to us. We don’t have the time to let Donald shoot himself in the foot. Not that he won’t; just that by the time he does too many of us will have also painfully lost some toes. We need a strategy with a faster payoff.

On the other hand, there is recent good news. Twelve Republican senators found the other day that Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to get his wall was finally too much for them to stomach. They voted to restrain him, despite knowing that their ‘revolt’ would fail on his veto, but aware that Clio, the goddess of history, was waiting, and that their constituents were not yet ready to write off their Constitution as a fake document.

For the record, these twelve, were named Romney, Alexander, Blunt, Collins, Lee, Moran, Murkowski, Paul, Portman, Rubio, Toomey, and Wicker. With luck those names may be hailed as the first signs of the return of sanity to Washington.

But first we must acknowledge that all of us, too, have been guilty of pretending that our idealistic view of the world is as fake as Donald’s. We talk with serious faces about democratic principles, the rights of man, women’s rights, workers’ rights, and universal respect for the individual as though these were real goals and real descriptions of the ideal world we are fighting for. We need to start by admitting that all that is bullshit. It does not describe any world you or I have ever seen or ever will see. What describes the world as it really functions is one word : corruption. Politicians struggle for power and use their power for two purposes : first, never to willingly leave the office they have worked so hard to gain, and second, to profit as much as they can from that office before they are shuffled off this mortal coil to some other, or not.

It was H. L. Mencken who said, “When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.” Ironically, Donald himself used it in referring to Clinton and Whitewater in the campaign for the 2016 nomination. What if we were to choose that as our guideline today? The overwhelming power of the Koch zillions is obvious. Their wealth seems to be in position to purchase the entire Senate in the next voting go-round if their campaign advisors and lobbyists have their way. Democrats have deep-pocketed donors, too, but not as deep.

With sufficient funds we might be able to convince more Republicans that there is more patriotism on the left side of the aisle than on the right. One by one, we might be able to peel away those who see that the ship is sinking, and persuade them to start crawling down the mooring ropes toward safety. But for encouragement they need a reward — a clink in the begging bowl. Not a stick, but a carrot. They are unlikely to get one from their Republican colleagues or from the K Brothers, so if there is to be one it will have to come from us Democrats. Are you ready?

A $20 contribution from each of Hillary’s 65,800,000 voters would create a 1.3 billion dollar fund to be spread among other Republicans thinking of joining the defectors. That’s more than the amount the Koch forces have announced they will spend in 2020 : 900 million. In short, especially if we place our shots effectively, we could be on an equal footing with the Darth Vader.

Would it pain you to contribute twenty bucks to anyone who would strip children from their mothers and fathers in the name of a useless wall? Of course it would, but in our camp we accept the basic understanding that democracy (small ‘d’) is based on compromise. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. (Unless you are Jared or Ivanka.)

So who could organize such a fund and decide where to use it for maximum effect as we get nearer 2020? What about the DNC (the Democratic National Committee) itself? They already have the mailing lists, the staff, and they are probably already up to their ears in shady-trick plans. All they need is the Jacksons (check your twenties). We can call the Fund ‘JFJ’ — ‘Jacksons For Justice’. You and I can start it off without further help. Just send the DNC a $20 GoFundMe contribution marked “Republican Bribery Fund, to be used to support Republicans with a grasp of reality”. I’ll guarantee you that after a few hundred thousand dollars come in, the Times and TIME and the rest of the scribblers will give you all the free publicity you could ask for, and you will find that the same opportunistic Republicans who put Trump in his present perch are still open to the siren call of those Jacksons.

And my faith in both Einstein and David Hume will be restored. My undying admiration for Mencken will be validated one more time.

Dear Donald,

Not to waste time dreaming up new pejorative nicknames, let’s get right to the point. I have been reading up on the cost of school lunches provided by the federal government to students who would otherwise go hungry at the noon break. There are many good reasons for us to be willing to increase the national debt by borrowing the money needed to pay for them. They will pay for themselves many times over in healthier future citizens, up to the task of creating the wealth that will produce the taxes that will be needed to repay the debt in future generations. I need not belabor the point, since your superior intellect will have anticipated my un-genius-likecomments.

The numbers are as follows:

• Number of school children receiving lunches this year – 30 million.

• Average cost of each lunch – $2.70.

• Number of school days in a year – (Mandated) – 180.

• Cost per student per year, therefore – 180 times $2.70 = $486. (Can we use a rounded figure of $500 to keep the math simple?)

• This produces a total annual cost of the federal lunch program of 30 million times $500 = $15 billion.

Cost for building the Great Mexican Wall –

• According to your accountants at the Department of Health and Human Services – $21.6 billion.

• According to several advisory committees made up of architects, builders, and contractors consulted by various House committees – from $50 to $70 billion, depending on what sort of wall and the conditions encountered “as we go along”. (Note that this does NOT include the political cost — damage to your base votes of the backlash from landowners whose acreage would be preempted by eminent domain and among ordinary citizens who do not see the need to allocate the back-bending strawberry-picking, vegetable-harvesting, and luxury-resort-bed-making jobs now being happily done by Mexican workers, many if not most of them “illegals”.) Can we use the figure of $50 billion, the low end of their estimates, keeping in mind the records of cost-overruns on similar large infrastructure projects of the past (Star Wars?) and the inclination of ideologically motivated politicians to minimize projected expenditures on undertakings conveniently located in their districts? Not to speak of the Mafia-type leeches in the construction industry eager to take advantage of the many kickback opportunities in such a large project.)

My conclusion –

• $50 billion would pay for the entire federal school lunch program for over three years, far more likely to justify our adding that to the growing national debt and more likely to benefit actual American citizens and Make America Great Again.

• I like strawberries, also fresh vegetables and wrinkle-free beds. This is a boat I would just as soon not rock.

Question: –

• Which program would you rather be given credit for on the Pearly Gate registration form Saint Peter’s clerk will hand you as you apply for entry? (In thinking about this, please DO take into consideration whatever respiratory problems Ivanka and Jared’s children and their offspring may develop as our air gets more difficult to breathe, and our need for as many alert, smart scientists as we can educate to figure out coping methods when the friendly temperate zone we are used to becomes desert or uninhabitable flood plain.)

Please send your reply to me at <vanceweaver23@gmail.com> Asap.

Thank you.

Great news!

In co-operation with the New York Times Travel Service, we are able to announce the inaugural season of No Trump Tours. These voyages are not only educational and fascinating in their own right, they are guaranteed to eliminate any mention of our present president during your trip. They will give you complete respite from the incessant pounding of the name Trump on your consciousness and place you in a Trump-free environment in which you can relax and recall those blessed days BTOOA (Before The Orange One Arrived). It will be a cold-turkey withdrawal from your involvement with him in any form.

Tours are limited to small groups of selected guests, who will sign a pledge not to mention the Forbidden Name for the duration of their time together. We will control access to the news by censoring newspapers and magazines available during our travels to ensure that all references to the Donald or any member of his family have been excised before they have a chance to be noticed by our guests. For those taking our boat or river tours, all methods of communication (even letters!) will be screened. WiFi will be monitored, with a time delay, to ensure that both incoming and outgoing messages are Trump-free. For those traveling by bus, similar precautions will prevail, as well as in the affiliated hotels and restaurants (all five-star) where our guests will be lodged. Even the routes over which our air-conditioned coaches will travel will be scouted in advance to make sure there are no billboards or signs that could break the spell. In the cities on our itineraries special news kiosks will be set up along the routes of our walking tours, with only vetted publications displayed (including redacted daily newspapers). We will of course also avoid any building displaying the Trump name, which may in some places necessitate travel by specially modified limousines with heavily tinted windows, but this will not prevent us from reaching all of the most selfie-worthy sites left on your bucket list.

We can offer you a No Trump vacation of any length you specify. (An open-ended trip can be arranged, in which you can decide to come home at any time if the stress of withdrawal proves too great, or if the cure takes effect more rapidly than you anticipated.) You will eventually have to return of course to Trump-polluted daily life but with your resistance strengthened, you will be more able to focus on real rather than reality-show issues.

For more information, consult www.https://notrumptours/itineraries or consult your travel agent.

And welcome to a vacation that will renew your faith that Trump is not an essential component in everyday life.

Vance, for No Trump Tours

My first thought on seeing the mid-term results was, “Shit! We lost some Senators. That’s not going to help.” I had been hoping that we could put up a solid front against Sir Orange, and maybe persuade him to tone things down a bit during the next two years.

My next thought was, “Well, we avoided an all-out fight. Now it’s only three to one : Trump and the Senate and the Supreme Court against the House of Representatives. Three to one we can probably handle.”

My third thought was, “I wonder how well Nancy Pelosi understands her position?” Now that she has her old job back will she become a Democratic McConnell or will she make a first move to get in touch with any “moderate” Republicans who might be out there, worrying about sticking their necks out any further on the Trump chopping block, in case 2020 turns into a rout?

I think the third thought was the best. This is, after all, a government, not a brawl, in spite of Donald’s attitude. There is a whole country at stake, and nearly half of it is unhappy and fearful. That they are unhappy may be laid to Trump’s account — he tells them ceaselessly that they live in a land imperiled from every side, including inside — but that they are fearful is not altogether Trump’s fault. They have in some cases good grounds to be. They have lost their 25-dollar-an-hour lifetime jobs, they are watching their pensions disappear and turn into buyback shareholder benefits and CEO bonuses, they are living right at the precipice of bankruptcy if they get seriously sick. They have a sense of being scorned by the better-educated half of the population — “dissed” in the jargon of rap. If they are to be reassured that America really can be made great again, they need to see evidence that Washington cares about them more than it cares about its perks.

The reaction to the Brussels elite and wannabe elite shown by England’s willingness to go recklessly through the looking glass without a road map or any reliable GPS guidance is evidence enough that being dissed can provide voters with a motive for almost any kind of ill-considered reaction. Democrats in the House, flush with victory would do well to stop and reflect on how dissed they have been feeling under the McConnell-Ryan-Trump heel during these past two years. It is not a pleasant feeling, and it isn’t conducive to careful and considered lawmaking.

Nancy and her supporters need to address those concerns and avoid starting a street fight. They need to try to bridge the remuneration gap, firm up the FDR pillars of the nanny state — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — turn the screws on Big Pharma and try to get health care under control, and firmly don the mantle of the hero looking out for the little guy. If that cuts the flow of campaign money, let it be known that little contributions can do the job if there are enough of them. GoFundMe can raise millions in just a few minutes if the bait is right. So let’s hand out the patronage jobs to women — lots of women — lots and lots of women — and get rid of the image of the cigar-smoking politicos in the back room. Put everything up front where the sunlight comes in through the window.

It has worked before. Go back and look at the records of the bitter battles over the original provisions of the Constitution. The need for a functioning country made it possible to accept the compromises needed on even such gut issues as slavery. We’ll have to learn to do it again. We must learn to do it again. The alternative is yellow hair and bullshit all the way down.

Dear Ms Warren,

You have lately been calling attention to the possibility of revising our tax structure so that it favors the less well off over the rich. Brava! Since 2014 I have been writing about that in my blog and in my newspaper column. A revision is overdue. We haven’t taken a second look since the original passage of the Sixteenth Amendment (1909, 14 years before I was born). That’s 110 years ago, a long time for any piece of regulatory legislation to remain unchanged as the world around it evolves. Especially when that world develops highly visible economic inequities.

So your message is welcome. But in my opinion it doesn’t go far enough. You talk in terms of modifications where it seems to me a basic re-thinking is required. History teaches us that tweaks and patches are invitations to special interests to expand their already mind-boggling roster of escape hatches for the well-connected and well-heeled. It seems to me that we need something drastic.

In my search for ideas I came upon the name of Henry George, an American journalist and economist who was influential at the turn of the century (not this century; the one before it). Mr George was known for his advocacy of the Single Tax (also known as the Land Tax). His proposal was simple and direct : God gave us this planet to take care of. He didn’t give it to self-appointed monarchs and feudal barons, bankers, thieves, or real estate speculators. In Mr George’s time we hadn’t yet developed such corner-cutting players as payday lenders, credit-card companies, or stock-brokers. God’s gift was intended for everyone, rich and poor alike. (And to be sure, honest and crooked as well.) That led to the ancient concept of the Commons — the wealth of the world as joint wealth — belonging to anyone who could make use of it. Hunting ranges, grazing lands, ore deposits, the fish of the sea. Not to be monopolized by hoarders, speculators, and people claiming either the Divine Right of Kings or simply fancy weapons and chutzpah. The notion of private property was thus a betrayal of His intention. Since in Mr George’s agricultural society land was nearly the sole basis for wealth, to set things right he said we would need to eliminate the private ownership of land altogether and accept instead our duty as stewards. This, he thought, could be best accomplished by a single, easily calculable tax on land. Land should constitute every citizens’ birthright. Each citizen’s tax bill should simply reflect the amount of the Commons he was making use of. Details about regulating the methods by which he had acquired his “right” to use it could be left to the usual political maneuverings, but the outcome should be a single tax. Thus taxation would be on the basis of real wealth, not on transactions — not on the movements of money, which are only approximate reflections of the assents of buyer or seller. Holdings are more easily identified, whether those of the wage-earner or the rentier landlord.

If you accept that principle, the problem becomes how to tax, not what to tax. Anything temporarily withdrawn by me from the Commons is my personal wealth and the more of it I have borrowed the greater my responsibility to pay for the privilege, especially if my use of it deprives someone else of access.

So we are down to methods. How will you define and measure my wealth? How will you detect and catch up with me and punish me if I am a scammer? How will you limit the degree of inequality of personal wealth to limits that will be perceived as fair by everyone? And, trickiest of all, how will you determine how much I will have to kick in to the public pot to keep the guardian of the Commons (the government) functioning?

To take the last problem first : we need some agreement on what level of economic security should be the right of every citizen, a level below which the government has the obligation to intervene with help and above which the government has a duty to declare a limit. This is the business of legislatures, where the competing claims and estimates of bureaucrats can be aired and compared and priorities determined. The wider the geographical areas represented in these legislatures, the more likely are the comparisons to be assessed critically and not hidden in “midnight amendments” to funding bills. This is perhaps the strongest argument for the Single Tax.

So I suggest we eliminate all taxes but one. Collect it on a national basis, and leave the details of revenue distribution, state by state (based on population), to Congress. Then leave its distribution to local authorities to the state legislatures. No rancher in Montana, no matter how well-meaning, can take the time to truly understand the issues of permitting more oil-burning electrical generating stations in New Hampshire. We are, after all, a diverse population with diverse interests. But let each request by municipal governments and each request by the state legislatures percolate separately through debate up to the national level and you will have the components of a percentage distribution across budget lines. (The importance of bridge maintenance on the Mississippi versus the costs of Presidential travel back and forth to The Private Residence, for example.) The allocation to the states by population can be a reliable figure so long as the Census Bureau is kept out of the hands of politicians. Add up all the budget requirements at ascending levels — village, municipal, state, and federal — and you will arrive at a total.

And now you will have reached the famous wall : “what the traffic will bear”. The traffic (the voters en masse) will consider the benefits of your decisions and the state of their wallets, and determine exactly where the wall should be located. With this knowledge you can use a simple formula (see below) to calculate the fair share that each citizen will have to pay as a fraction of his wealth, to keep the government functioning at a level he considers fair.

Next question is how to determine each individual’s wealth. In our society we use money as a measure, really only because we haven’t found a better one. Admittedly, wealth may sometimes be a poor correlate of satisfaction, but we have not yet found a way to monetize happiness, and we can’t use it to measure itself. In a world where private property is defined by its market value, we will have to accept that as the measure. Who gets the job of determining that? Put the burden of calculating each citizen’s wealth on everyone — the same honor system that the IRS respects now. You will be presumed to be an honest reporter until an audit proves that you weren’t.

Then (in our present state of different legal treatment for the poor and the wealthy), if you are poor you are thrown into jail if you can’t come up with bail or, if you are rich, you are sent home with a slap on the wrist and a bracelet on your ankle to continue your jet-set life until your lawyers run out of postponements and the judges run out of patience and the tabloids run out of interest. For the wealthy, if you are eventually judged guilty of tax evasion the present penalty is for you to pay up what you owe, add a small fine, and go about your life of serial bankruptcy as though nothing had happened. That’s known as Trumping the system. For the poor, who can’t get any poorer, it’s either a few wasted years in jail, where they have no opportunity to earn the money required to pay what they owe, or a life on welfare because no one will give an ex-con a job. If you find this state of affairs as ridiculously unbalanced as I do, how do you ensure that it won’t simply continue under a wealth tax?

There is actually a powerful weapon at hand : confiscation. For reasons I cannot explain the ambition of rich people seems always to be to get richer still. Even for the billionaire who pledges to give away half his wealth before he dies, there seems to be remarkably little impulse to make it happen sooner rather than later. Under a wealth tax plan, each citizen would be responsible for evaluating his own wealth. The tax would be calculated on an annual snapshot. A list of assets and their value would be compiled and submitted to the IRS by each taxpayer. Omitting something from the list would be considered evidence that the owner has formally disowned it. It would then become public property, subject to auction with the proceeds going directly to the Treasury. The “forgetful” owner, or the negligent employer who neglected to supervise his “rogue” financial advisor may be given the right to re-purchase his former property by matching the high bid, but with the addition of a suitable (hefty) percentage penalty payable to the Treasury. Under-evaluation of any individual item on someone’s list, when uncovered by IRS auditors, would result in a double tax on the amount of the under-valuation, plus a fat fine. (Here we can anticipate another gold mine for the legal profession, but then, they are entitled to make a living, too, aren’t they? It’s still a capitalist country, whatever the Donald says. And the damages will be restricted to those who were rich enough to pay a white-shoe law firm in the first place. So where’s the greater harm?)

How will the IRS know when it is being scammed? Do not underestimate the power of the whistleblower. Fifteen percent of a couple of million dollars will wonderfully concentrate the mind, as Mark Twain might have observed. How did your neighbor manage on a clerk’s salary to acquire that Lamborghini in his driveway? Since his estimate of his own net worth would be public (To make this whole thing work we would obviously all have to declare our wealth publicly), retribution would be a single mouse click away and the reward would be juicy.

So we come to the question of the Single Tax rate. What percentage of our net worth will you and I as taxpayers have to kick in each year to make all this work?

Not as difficult as you might think, provided you keep your goals firmly in mind : 1. Adequate government funding. 2. Fairness. And 3. An algorithm that will keep everything adjusted and loophole free from year to year without the need (and risk) of Congressional intervention. A form of COLA, if you will, a simple Cost Of Living Adjustment.

We will need three numbers : the cost of running the government, the total national wealth, and the number of taxpayers upon whom it will be incumbent to come up with the cash.

My back-of-the-envelope estimate would suggest our national wealth at 322 trillion, allocating all assets to individual people, who after all own all the artificial entities currently exempted from paying taxes, such as non-profits, schools, churches, overseas branch offices, etc., all those shady entities blessed by the Supreme Court with artificial personhood that would be of course be terminated.

The number of current taxpayers in 2017 was 138 million, according to official figures. The number of exempt “entities” whose assets would be transferred to private ownership is about 1.5 million, according to the same source. Call the total 140 million, for the sake of simplicity.

The cost of funding the government for the current fiscal year as been officially budgeted at something between 3.5 and 4 trillion. We can use 3.75 trillion as a reasonable estimate.

Now we face the issue of fairness. It is obviously ridiculous to simply say that each taxpayer will have to pay $26,786 ($3.75 trillion divided by 140 million) to keep the country solvent. Those who benefit from Law and Order the most will have to assume the lion’s share of the burden. And on the other side of the coin, those who need the most help from government will have to not only be exempted from having to pay; their support must be included as part of the cost of government in the first place. How to accomplish this fairly is a puzzle. The principle of the Commons would suggest a solution. If our total national wealth is 322 trillion, and we are all its owners, then the fair share of each of us is 322 trillion divided by 327 million (the 2018 number for total population), or roughly a million dollars per person. (Actually $984,709.)

Didn’t think you were so wealthy? You are. And that’s only personal wealth. Think of all the roads, schools, buildings, courtrooms, police stations, yes, and the tanks and bombs and battleships and airplanes your citizenship gives you a share in, whether you like it or not — you benefit from them and have a duty to maintain them in good working order. It’s why you pay taxes in the first place.

According to these numbers, the required overall tax rate on this personal national wealth to finance one year’s budget would be 3.75 trillion divided by our national wealth (322 trillion), or about $1.17 of obligation per hundred dollars of wealth. Since the tax burden is being shared among only 140 million taxpayers, the cost of each individual share rises to 3.75 trillion (cost of one year’s budget) divided by 140 million, which calls for an average of $2.86 per dollar of net worth. Reasonable enough.

But now we have to make some more assumptions. A flat rate of 2.86 percent is an impossible number for a lot of folks whose net worth may be zero or less. They won’t be able to pay, even if they want to. So we shall have to excuse them, and even find a way to help them by spending more money on them if we can. If everyone’s fair share of the Commons is a million dollars, we have an easy baseline from which to measure our individual deviations from it, and with the exception of those requiring assistance instead of tax bills, what we need is an estimate of the number of people above and below that million-dollar line, and of how much revenue we need from those who can be expected to pay the tax to help pay those who will receive government subsidies.

The U.S. Budget for 2019 is projected by the Budget Office to be $3.45 trillion. I take the numbers below from a 2018 report by Credit Suisse’s Research Institute’s Global Wealth Databook.

There are 143 million taxpaying households. 122 million of them control 85% of the country’s wealth. That’s $274 billion. (I am rounding everything to make the calculations easier.) There are 28 millions of us who have net worths that put us so far below the official poverty level that we will require government assistance over and above the current help we are getting from Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and housing subsidies. The cost of this added help comes to an average of about $45,000 per family, which will add $1.26 trillion to the budget, now estimated at $3.45 trillion. So approximately 215 million households will share the burden of raising $4.7 trillion. Prorated over their net worth holdings ($274 billion) that comes to an average flat tax rate of approximately

$4.7 trillion

divided by $274 billion

equals 17 %.

Does that sound scary? It shouldn’t. According to a recent survey of 130 million consumers, the average American taxpayer now already pays a total of 14% in federal, state, and local taxes alone, and that doesn’t count all the other incidental taxes we pay, such as sales taxes and fuel taxes and highway tolls and property taxes and gift taxes and tobacco taxes and soft-drink taxes and estate taxes and value-added taxes and who knows what more? And almost all of them fall heaviest on the poor (where they constitute a larger percentage share of income).

Spend a few hours chasing around the Internet and the official reports from all sorts of NGOs and government agencies and you will quickly conclude that determining a more accurate figure than that is hopeless. All the numbers are subject to every kind of distortion white-shoe tax-avoidance lawyers have ever been able to think of, as well as all the loopholes compliant legislators have been able to build into the tax code. I think with everything taken into account : federal, state, local, Social Security and Medicare, and all the rest it is safe to say that the average is probably north of 33%. That’s how much of our individual income it takes to run all levels of our government. To eliminate all other taxes and raise that sum with a levy of 17 % on everyone whose net worth exceeds a million dollars sounds like a bargain to me.

The most efficiently run democratic states right now (such as Denmark or Sweden) now have income tax rates of over 50%. Their citizens continue to vote the governments responsible into office, and profess themselves satisfied with things. They are relieved of worries about health care, education, and employment, and they score in the top ten of the UN’s Happiness Index.

Of course, as time passes and people’s net worth is decreased (that’s the whole point of the exercise; remember?) the rate will have to go up. But it will keep pace with spending, since it is recalculated every year, and as the present extraordinary gap between top and bottom decreases we will approach a fair sharing of the cost of everything from filling potholes to building new aircraft carriers, and we may even be prodded to rethink some of our priorities. (Is a new bridge in Speedunk, Iowa that will serve 100 commuters a day really more important than getting a few thousand homeless people in Upperville, Oregon out of the cold and into into decent housing?)

Remember the definition of compromise : “A plan that satisfies no one but avoids revolution.”

Using our 1 million dollar net worth baseline, the easiest way to let the richer pay more than the poorer would be a simple 1 million deduction. Net worth below that you pay nothing; above that you pay a flat rate on every dollar. Start with 17% and adjust starting with the second year, after the true size of the personal net worth of Americans is known. Each year will bring a new calculation, but the algorithm remains the same provided that the cutoff amount is firmly tied to the national net worth total : 1/322 billionth of national net worth. So long as that is religiously observed, loopholes and special perks will be closed, never to be reopened.

Problem solved? Not yet. The difficulty will be in putting the solution into a catchy phrase and selling it to a public that has been trained by Trump not to listen to details. “Single Tax” and “Land Tax” didn’t do it for Henry George, but something similar might be worth a try. People are a bit more educated now than they were in 1800, and a bit more critical of flim-flam men (and the greatest of them all, the Donald himself). The notion of no more sales taxes, no more property taxes, no more shuffling receipts and checking credit card accounts, might be sufficiently appealing to get some attention.

How does, “One Tax” grab you?

Or maybe, “Pocahontas to the Rescue!”

Respectfully yours,

Vance Weaver

I published a post about baseball on my blog back in 2016. It concerned the fantasy of the curveball. The curveball does not exist, it has never existed, and it never will exist. The strength of a pitcher’s wrist and fingers simply do not allow him to apply sufficient spin to an object of a baseball’s weight and size to result in any Magnus effect during the four tenths of a second that elapses between the ball’s release and the time it reaches the plate.

This fact was documented in a LIFE magazine article in 1941. The photographer Djon Mili set up his (then new and revolutionary) stroboscopic camera and enlisted the cooperation of Carl Hubbell and Cy Blanton, then conceded to be the foremost masters of the curveball, one in each major league. For the experiment a curve was defined as any deviation, however slight, from a perfectly straight trajectory, either lateral or vertical, with the exception of that produced by gravity.

LIFE’s contention that the curveball never happens was, and still is, heresy. Sports empires have been built on the belief of millions of people worldwide that a pitched baseball can “curve”, “hop”, “dip”, “tail away” and perform other actions when thrown by a highly paid pitcher in a hugely profitable ballpark and broadcast on TV programs that pay fortunes for the privilege (and the profits from advertising between innings). This belief is supported by unanimous testimony from umpires, batters, commentators, sportswriters, and fans, all of whom claim to have witnessed such miracles, and who relish any opportunity to discuss its particular variations. (One-seam, two-seam, four-seam, slider, cutter.) This is the stuff of endless conversation wherever baseball is played. A necessary topic for the hot-stove league.

It is simply wrong.

Belief in the curveball is based, ophthalmologists tell us, on a glitch in our vision system, as it tries to accommodate itself to tracking an object (when it leaves the pitcher’s hand) apparently headed directly at the eye but re-evaluated en route by refined perspective as it comes nearer. The ball was never going to smash into his eye, but the batter’s view of it as it left the pitcher’s hand led his brain to predict that it would. His eye was unable to perceive the tiny deviation that would result instead in a near miss. The ball was always going to miss, but his visual discrimination wasn’t quick enough to see that right away. At the last minute his vision readjusted to reality. Umpires and batters and the writers and fans all interpret this as “movement” and the ball appears to them to have changed direction.

Ask yourself three questions if you want to be convinced.

• Have you ever seen a “long throw” from the outfield to the cutoff man or the catcher, curve on its way? (You have seen a foul ball curve as it approaches the foul pole, but it was not thrown, and it traveled a lot further than 60 feet and it had different forces acting on it.) Tennis balls, golf balls, soccer balls all curve, but the relative speeds and weights are quite different. Bowling balls and curling stones can be made to curve, but they are resting on a surface that provides a grip — however slight — for friction. If Carl Hubbell could have used spin to make his pitches curve surely Ducky Medwick, when he spit into his glove (frequently!) would have by accident produced an occasional curve in his throws to the plate, and clever infielders would have learned to make the ball curve around an obstructing runner in a run-down.

• Think seriously about the “breaking” ball. Have you ever asked yourself how a thrown ball can move in a straight line for 55 feet and then suddenly change direction? What would Newton have to say about the possibility of such behavior? And what would he say about the possibility that a ball could get a variance from the law of gravity to suddenly hop or sink only when it neared the batter?

• Have you ever asked yourself why a so-called “knuckle ball”, that has no spin at all, is considered the most erratic and unpredictable of pitches? The myths about its movement, and the broken fingers of catchers who have trouble catching it, are recurring legends of the sport.

I anticipated that as soon as my blog piece hit the Internet there would be a mass re-evaluation of the game, together with mea culpas in the coaching habits of all those twelve-year-old boys who were ruining their arms by striving to throw “in-shoots” and “down-shoots” and “out-shoots” and become millionaires. If pitching were acknowledged to be a simple combination of velocity and accuracy they could concentrate instead on those things, and on the psychology of the guessing game that is every at-bat. How many kids today are deforming their arm bones and ruining their tendons trying to produce those impossible effects?

No, of course I didn’t really expect instant reform. No more than, I’m sure, the editors of LIFE, boasting a much bigger circulation than my blog, expected similar results back in 1941. Too many tickets, too much money, too many businesses, too many reputations, were dependent on maintaining the fantasy. But I did expect that at least a few pitching coaches might have been paying attention. And maybe some parents.

Judging from what I read on the sports pages, none have as yet. Pitchers are still the stars of the game, and they are still idolized for their mastery of magic tricks that do not exist.

But if we think about it honestly, pitching can only be a guessing game. If I as a batter am expecting a high inside fastball and instead get a low outside changeup, I am pretty well handcuffed. I can’t adjust to that extreme difference in the few tenths of a second before the ball is past me.

Think of a cross-section of the strike zone as a tic-tac-toe diagram. If the pitcher is accurate enough to put the ball in whichever square he chooses, he has nine options. If a batter guesses correctly, he can apply all his skill to actually meeting the ball and driving it. If he guesses wrong, and has to switch his attention to a different square at the last moment, he is at a huge disadvantage. Neither his concentration nor his muscles can react in time. A good pitcher then will be able to make use of those eight-to-one odds. Add to that the mythical belief in “movement” as a psychological excuse for failure, and the pitcher has an overwhelming advantage. In fact this advantage shows most clearly in baseball’s cherished statistics. Batters fail three quarters of the time. Leagues report that the number of annual strikeouts keeps rising as pitchers get taller and stronger.

Nothing could be more inimical to the future of the professional game than a continued slide into the ultimate boredom for spectators — swing-and-a-miss, swing-and-a-miss, swing-and-a-miss, and an occasional home run. Never a chance for the fielders to get into the game at all. They could just sit down in place, as Satchel Page used to signal them to do when he wanted to show off. Why would fans want to pay for three hours of nothing happening? How many times can Junior be taken to the bathroom? How many overpriced hot dogs can you eat? How many celebrities can be introduced? Fortunately, most starting pitchers are not that accurate, even over the five or six innings that is all they are expected to produce these days. As they tire their accuracy suffers. Batters begin to home in on their strategies. They “get used to” a pitcher after a few unsuccessful at-bats and become more confident in their guesses — and more often right.

Managers react to this with a well-stocked bull pens : filled with big strong guys who can throw real heat for maybe only one or two innings before they tire, but who present a fresh problem to batters who suddenly have to forget what they managed to learn about the starter in their earlier at bats, and begin the psychological contest all over again, with fewer innings left to go.

All this mythology is grist for the baseball mill, which devours statistics and spits out predictions and loves to measure and argue the relative skills of players. So what’s the harm? Let the fans have their fun.

But what if we’re not talking about pitching, but other social myths, like “the rule of law” or “brown people are inherently stupider than white people” or “giving a person a lifetime appointment to the legal bench removes ambition and financial temptation”?

The actual facts don’t matter. Beliefs matter. Proof is irrelevant. LIFE sold its million copies in 1941 when it restarted and now we can forget about it. What people think is fact is what really matters; not whether the facts are in fact facts. (Ask the Donald, the master of flim flam and fake news.) Does the enduring myth of the curve ball illustrate that? Is it important that it be pointed out? You tell me.

(First publishd a week ago. Made temporarily irrelevant 25 January. To be reinstated 15 February.)

Let’s go straight to the math with no preliminaries :

• Number of government workers laid off because of the shutdown – 800,000

• Average wage losses per week per worker – $1,250. (This is based on estimates of the effects of the first three weeks. Bear in mind that this includes people who can probably afford to ignore a temporary interruption of their pay, which will in any case be retroactively reinstated. This leaves about a half a million workers whose lives will be severely affected for lack of any cushion to pay for their groceries, electricity, rent, tuition, and credit-card debt. This includes people whose regular government checks will not be coming because there are no people on the job to process them. Even if they can find a bank willing to lend to them — which many will be unable to do due to poor credit histories and lack of assets — the costs of borrowing are the kind that tend to snowball incrementally according to established banking practices and become insurmountable.)

• Total cost of support required to keep these half a million afloat until the Congress v. President impasse is settled, which could be as much as a year – $1,250 times 52 weeks times 500,000 people equals 32.5 billion. (Note that this is considerably less than the estimated 55 billion required to complete the Useless Wall.)

• Number of voters in the election of 2016, the one that got us into this mess in the first place – 137.5 million.

• Amount each registered voter would have to contribute to fend off catastrophe for those laid off for a whole year (unlikely, but possible unless Nancy Pelosi can “borrow” an airplane from George Soros to fly to Afghanistan) – 32.5 billion divided by 137.5 million equals $236. Think of this as $236 divided by 52, or $4.54 a week. Exempt the 800,000 furloughed workers from being counted as contributors (leaving 137.5 million minus 800 thousand, and you come up with $238, or $4.58 a week per person.

• Now what all that means is that if every voter dropped a $5 bill in the tip jar every Saturday instead of having that extra order of fries, there would be no difficulty in protecting the laid-off and furloughed workers from the schoolyard fight going on in Washington. It seems to me a small price to pay, especially considering that it is highly unlikely that this foolishness will actually continue for a year.

There. The math wasn’t that difficult once you got started, was it? Now comes the problem of execution, though. How do we get the money from the tip jars into the pockets of the aid-off? And where do we set up the tip jars?

The first thought is that the banks could do it. They already have the information about whose paychecks have been stopped, and they know who the affected workers are. They could do this as a public service and earn themselves not only the gratitude of those rescued workers but restore the shine that tarnished their reputations in 2008 when those same workers (wearing their taxpayer hats that time) had to bail them out of the hole they dug for themselves with their phony “enhanced investment vehicles” that turned out to be nothing but slick scams.

The second thought is that the banks would be the last place you could expect would offer an honest deal. Seeing that much money go across their counters without being able to get their hooks on it would be a great temptation to invent some more complicated “investment vehicles” to enable them to siphon off as much of it as possible as it went in and out of their control.

Who, then? I say let the churches handle it. Not any particular church; just any church that the IRS has certified. (I would love to exclude the so-called Church of Scientology and the one where ISIS keeps its funds, but Rudy Giuliani is already employed where he might well be involved in a conflict of interest, and I wouldn’t know how to do it without equally shysterly help.)

So let every church and temple and mosque mount (securely) a Help box by its front door where civic-minded citizens can deposit a fiver once a week. Let the media (especially the TV) publicize the deal, give it a catchy name, and stress that the donors can expect no return of their investment — it is to be done simply as a humanitarian gesture and only for the duration of the shutdown.

Let each church and mosque and temple figure out for itself how to distribute the money to those who need it. Such organizations are always glad for opportunities to form working groups to do good deeds. It solidifies their faith in the power of collective action in the name of a higher purpose than usury. They will find a way, and best of all they will do it with intimate knowledge of the local neighborhoods where the need is most felt.

Will there be cheating? Of course. The Help boxes will occasionally be looted. The recipients of funds will occasionally “forget” to pay back what they accepted once their salaries have been retroactively reinstated. Will it be any more prevalent than what the banks would do? Not likely. And there is no alternative that I can think of while the official government agencies formerly in charge of payments remain shut down. What do we have to lose? Maybe, on the contrary, an honor system that worked might help restore honor systems to respectability, which would be a welcome outcome.

And what about the repaid funds when the crisis is over? The donors have already decided to treat their contributions as bread upon the waters. They do not expect restitution. They have to a large extent expressed their charitable impulses by their choice of churches. Then let those churches and mosques and temples enjoy the inflow of repaid loans, and use them for more worthy purposes, according to their own lights.

And what will the lesson be for the pseudo-adult squabblers in Washington who have been put to shame by the relatively effortless efficiency of an ad hoc reaction to solve a problem rather than to determine “winners” and “losers”. There may be a blueprint here for the future.

Fish-mouth Ronald McDonald can go back to his golf game and Fancy Nancy can get an Air Force plane for her fact-finding visit to the troops and the rest of us can concentrate on the important things we used to worry about before Hillary let us down. Like the Super Bowl. Do you think Tom’s still got it?

Economists concern themselves with money : its income and outgo, just as we all must do unless we choose to rely on “God will provide” as a life plan. They divide their specialty into “macro” and “micro” economics, according to whether their main interest is the financial health of large entities — usually countries — or of smaller entities — little companies or just families.

Macroeconomics is a rather bloodless science that uses mathematical analysis to try to extract cause-and-effect information from observations of past correlations. See the current fad for Big Data as a substitute for analytical thinking. When the variety of conflicting theories is so bewildering that there is no body of agreed-on explanations, correlations are made to do. This strategy is supposed to make it possible for us to avoid repeating the cycle of major national and international economic catastrophes of the past known as “boom and bust.” Its main achievements heretofore have been in the form of academic papers salted with charts and formulas and laden with PhD aspirations. Practical recommendations, perhaps not so much.

Microeconomics has narrower aims. It focuses on family or company survival no matter how catastrophic conditions bequeathed us by macroeconomics may be. The micro kind of economics is therefore more likely to be of interest to real people in real life. As the basis for family or company budgeting, microeconomics sometimes works reasonably well even in troubled macroeconomic situations.

Those definitions are my own, of course; and do not necessarily accord with those you will find in economic textbooks or the dictionary, but I think my versions are useful in that they make a distinction between the two ways we need to think when we indulge in general talk about “economics” as though it were a unified subject. Too often we make the mistake of transferring jargon from one category to the other when we should be recognizing the distinction between them.

To cite a couple of examples : in our national budgeting we consider the percent of the budget expended on health care as a macroeconomic problem and largely ignore the horrendous microeconomic results we can produce by changing it by some carefully thought-out fraction of a percentage point, while in our family planning our effort is quite properly about caring for ourselves and our loved ones, and we really don’t care whether our actions raise or reduce governmental expenditures by a fraction of a percentage point or not. We want to make Aunt Mabel comfortable during the waning years of her life, federal deficit be damned. When we consider the option of replacing all the light bulbs in the house with LEDs, we recognize the eventual savings to both the economy and the ecology if everyone were to do the same (macro), but we are forced first to evaluate the change on the basis of whether we can afford to (a) throw away our investment in all the bulbs we presently own, and (b) ravage our credit-card balances with a sizeable expenditure on new ones that cost considerably more than the old ones did (micro). This results in squabbling economists “talking past each other” and a lot of confusion. That confusion infects discussions of unrelated things like the budget line item for aircraft carriers versus the one for subsidizing the visiting nurse service aimed at keeping Aunt Mabel out of the clutches of pay-for-service doctors and Medicare- and Medicaid-scamming doctors and hospital administrators.

This “talking past each other” is not inevitable, however. I think if the macroeconomists understood that their concerns really should be regarded as merely the sum of the concerns of all the microeconomists — in other words, that the chief aim of our national leaders should be the welfare of its individual citizens rather than the health of the national balance sheet — we could improve the quality of the dialogue. Instead of shaving every government department’s budget by an arbitrary percentage and letting individual care providers and patients cope and scheme as best they can, our aim should first be to provide people with satisfactory lives and afterwards worry about the way to pay for it. This is surely not easy, but I should like to suggest that it is also not impossible. I shall point to one country where I think the lesson has been learned and venture some comments on how it was accomplished there.

I am neither a politician nor an economist, but I do read the papers and some magazines and even an occasional book, and I have been living on this planet for 90-plus years and traveling around and trying to keep my eyes open for over 70. Most importantly for purposes of this essay I have talked to a lot of people in a lot of different countries (though almost all of them were in what we call the developed world, where I happen to have been born) and I have tried to be sensitive to what we might call the happiness quotient of their citizens. In my un-academic, uncertified, and highly personal opinion the citizens who seem most contented with their governments, their living conditions, their leaders, and their prospects for the future seem to live in countries with tax structures (macro) that support high standards of living, high levels of compassion, and correspondingly high taxes.

This is not accepted as a good patriotic American conclusion. In this country the myth that the road to personal success is open to everyone willing to take a chance and apply some perspiration is supposed to be convincingly demonstrated by businessmen like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and politicians like Barack Obama. Conversely, we picture the welfare-state citizen as a sort of ambitionless jellyfish drifting this way and that on a tide of cradle-to-grave security that will finally wash him up on an island of irresponsible security. I suggest that we should test that world-view on a focus group of street kids in Harlem whose fathers decamped long ago, whose mothers live in a haze of dope and alcohol and disappointed hopes and whose ‘hood is regularly raked by gunfire and is never visited by representatives of any social agency because “it’s too dangerous to go there.” Compare their views with those of children in any Scandinavian country who were raised in well maintained and supported child-care facilities that allowed their mothers to work at good-paying jobs relaxed in the knowledge that their kids were safe and well-fed and surrounded by caring and capable and well-paid teachers.

Take Sweden, for example.

It happens that I lived in Sweden for a couple of years, some sixty-odd years ago. I went there out of curiosity after having received my ruptured duck and severance pay from the army and had finished my college degree courtesy of the GI Bill. A book on my Sociology reading list had been Marquis Child’s “The Middle Way,” an account of the social democratic political revolution in Sweden that occurred when the Labor Party gained control of the government. One of the first things I discovered about the welfare state was that although there were strict rules about the need for official documents for visitors (for which I didn’t qualify) I had no problem finding employers who were more interested in my practical skills and my eagerness to learn Swedish than in my lack of papers. And despite the many rules and regulations supposedly governing every facet of day-to-day socialist life (from liquor rationing to opening a bank account) they were unlikely to be enforced by any individual Swede — in or out of an official capacity — when they conflicted with common sense. The average citizen paid 53% of his income in taxes (the same as today), and the top marginal rate (levied on incomes of over $25,000 a year in those days, which would be equivalent to $340,000 today) was a full 100% (that’s been modified). This chased into exile a few of the top one-percent earners (very few), but there was little complaint from the 99%, who didn’t have to spend so much as a single öre of their income for health care or education or any basic need.

(As a visitor on a tourist visa I once spent three weeks in Stockholm’s General Hospital recovering from a skiing mishap. I received those three weeks of care, and crutches, and a walker, not to speak of the services of doctors, nurses with lovely Scandinavian smiles, and even as a finale a Husqvarna bicycle, from the health service without — although mind you I was not a citizen — a bill for any part of it.) My Swedish friends considered this quite normal. The system was there to take care of people; not to meet budget line-item goals or to discriminate against foreigners.

So how did the country’s economy manage to survive? Most non-Swedish economists (macro), especially those in Lockean capitalist countries, solemnly predicted disaster. The rules had been newly made by a recently installed government heavily backed by the trade union movement, without (the experts said) due consideration of fiscal reality, which would inevitably lead to quick bankruptcy, since the economy couldn’t possibly survive the out-of-control national debt being racked up by all these nanny-state services. The same prediction — in the same dire language — is still being made today, 70 years later, by their philosophic protegés, but so far, even with the recent controversial addition of hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers (Sweden’s population is presently about 9.5 million, of which 14.3% are foreign born, 9.2% of them from non-EU countries, many of them heavy users of the schools, new-parent support and social services including unemployment benefits). Sweden is still one of the EU’s economic powerhouses, and according to the UN’s official “Happiness Index,” is consistently among the top 10 of the 187 countries covered by the survey. (If you are curious, Norway is number one. The U.S. is number 4.)

So what’s the point?

Well for one thing it raises a question about quality of life versus balancing of budgets. It’s a nice thought that you might be able to leave behind you a neat set of ledgers where the income column and the expense column balance perfectly. You could have them reproduced in granite and use them as your tombstone, after having deprived yourself of all luxury during your life to achieve a macroeconomist’s dream. On the other hand you could ask yourself whether your unquestioning loyalty to absolute numerical income-equals-outgo equality had accomplished more for the welfare of your planet, your country, your family —and yourself — than a less tight-sphinctered approach might have done.

You could ask yourself whether the setting of macroeconomic goals first and tailoring microeconomic goals to meet them is really the most sensible way of looking at the science of economics (sometimes with good reason called by skeptics the “dismal science”) as a whole, or whether successful macroeconomics might not be better determined simply by adding up total of each citizen’s microeconomic requirements. If 53% income taxes gives you freedom from worry about health care and school tuition and shelter and family solvency mightn’t that be more contributory to national and individual happiness than a neatly balanced set of books? Isn’t there something trying to sneak in here about a cart and a horse?

You might also wonder whether micro and macro economics are really two branches of the same subject, as college catalogs tend to list them, or whether they are completely separate disciplines in need of new names that would encourage us to think of them in a new light.

No, I am not talking about the party-loyal double-blinkered gang on which the Donald and Messrs O’Connell and Ryan rely for their rock-solid voting block. I have given up on them. They have apparently made their decision to go down with the ship — trumpets playing, flags flying, partisanship-above-all reputations secure for the historians. I am talking about the young idealistic ambitious up-and-comers who know that the days of this triumvirate — no matter how entrenched —are inevitably numbered. Their individual dates with Father Time will not be denied by ever-so-much gerrymandering and diddling with ballot boxes and hard-to-get voter IDs. The purchasing power of the Boss Tweeds and the Koch Brothers and their ilk has always historically been eventually nullified by some reform movement or other — whether led by a resurgent good-government opposition or a new megalomaniac crusader with a different agenda.

The power acquired by long-serving congressional leaders through seniority (regardless of brains or ability) grows steadily throughout their tenures and then one fine morning, poof! The flag-draped coffin lies in the Capitol rotunda, the well-worn encomiums are cranked out one more time, the music stops, and the mad scramble for the vacated chair begins. It is in that mad scramble that political career opportunity lies. The future is as unlikely to be just a continuation of the past as tomorrow’s weather is likely to be a repetition of today’s. There will be new alliances, new dependencies, new obligations, and new chairmanships and therein is the allure of a political career. Look at Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter. Talk about left field.

You never know. Never underestimate the impact of a seemingly trivial slip-up that may suddenly open the door. Gary Hart, John Edwards. Even the giants, like Al Gore or Bill Clinton, stand always at the edge of the cliff.

So where are all the astute young men and women from the Republican ranks who can smell the blood in the water — the smart, overachieving, helicoptered children who paid attention when the civics teacher was talking, studied their Constitutional history, went to the right schools (Yale above all, or, lacking the silver spoon, The City College of New York, or Howard University in approximately that order of current admissions desirability) and who are shooting for a life of eminence, influence, and DC perks as their careers? Surely their familiarity with the odds and their competitors should have enabled them to gauge their chances with a fair degree of accuracy, and surely, if that is so, by now their insights as to their own opportunities, although they may vary, must be aware that a large-scale page-turning is in the offing.

By now, considering the totally beyond-the-pale state of our normal political standards, there should be pockets of sharp, capable people with their eyes on the prizes, jockeying for position, readying themselves for inclusion on the next roster of DC VIPs. If they are there, why don’t I see them?

Why does no daring young Republican leader seem to want to take a chance and be the first rat down the rope? So far the absconders seem to consist exclusively of the crooks, grifters, grafters and criminals who feel the Hot Breath of Mueller; not claimants to a fresh set of voter offerings or different ways of looking at the same old rich/poor, urban/rural, educated/blue-collar, unbounded greed/social conscience, save-the-planet/screw-the-grandchildren divisions.

Jeff Flake and Jon McCain do not constitute much of a horde, and McCain is already dead. Where are these aspiring and clever future aspirants to leadership with the courage to test their classroom lessons instead of listening only to the old mantras of

• “Get the Black Bastard out”,

• “Kill FDR’s social revolution”,

• “Kill everything Obama ever touched”,

• “Check with the NRA and Koch and your campaign bank account before you speak”

that have got them into this pickle. (For there seems to be no question that between the Witch Hunt and the suddenly re-awakened Responsible Press, there seems to be the slimmest of chances that the electorate will repeat its mistake in 2020.)

Does this invisibility mean that there are no sharp minds among young Republicans, capable of figuring this out for themselves and starting to rumble about new directions? Does it mean that they and McConnell and Ryan and the Donald are content to see their country go down the drain just for the satisfaction of “winning”? I have no problem imagining such an ending for Trump, whose huge ego could very well only achieve full satisfaction in a Götterdämmerung ending, with trumpets blaring and artificial smoke curling above the stage as he waves his tin sword and curses at his “unfair” fate, but both McConnell and Ryan are experienced politicians, to whom the possibility of electoral catastrophe is part of the thrill of simultaneously serving and screwing the people. And surely today’s crop of ambitious millennials is better educated and more realistic than either they or the Donald?

Or is it me? (I?) Am I so dense that I can’t fathom that Trump has already so fundamentally changed the rules of our government (backed by his hand-picked Supreme Court appointees) to some new form that I am unable to recognize, that things will never be the same again, and that it is my myopia, and not the misjudgment of the new class of Republicans, that is being revealed?

If I am failing to recognize that the new wave (not Blue or Red, nor capable nor incompetent) is somehow here below my radar, then comfort me with the news before Father Time catches up with me too. It will make my journey easier. If I am just being obstinate and curmudgeonly and the New Age is already here and Mitch and Paul and Donald and David Duke are the real shape of the future, draw some sort of curtain over the scene so I don’t have to watch. I can perhaps make do with what time I have left in learning to crochet or stick pretty glass shards on misshapen pottery articles and stop reading agitprop articles in the radical magazines like The New York Review or the New Yorker, or yellow-sheet rags like the New York Times. This hanging on the edge of the ledge by my fingernails every morning as the news comes in is wearing me out. I need a rest before I go.