Category: abortion

Politics and Principles

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July 13, 2025

by Stephen Stofka

Sunday morning and another breakfast with the boys as they discuss world events and persistent problems. The conversations are voiced by Abel, a Wilsonian with a faith that government can ameliorate social and economic injustices to improve society’s welfare, and Cain, who believes that individual autonomy, the free market and the price system promote the greatest good.

Abel sat back in his seat as the busser poured some coffee. “I wonder how much Trump’s tariffs on Brazil will raise coffee prices.”

Cain waited a moment until the busser left. “I wish Senate Republicans would challenge him on that. I mean, we export more to Brazil than we import. Congress just cowers in the corner while Trump engages in all these petty political vendettas.”

As soon as the busser left, the waitress arrived to take their orders. Abel tucked his table napkin into his belt. “A few weeks ago, we were talking about inequality before and after taxes. Last week, Paul Krugman wrote about the growing inequality since  the 1980s. He mentioned a paper where the authors recommended a 73% top marginal income tax rate, more like the rates this country had in the period after World War 2 (Source). There was more equality, and we paid down the war debt.”

Cain tilted his head slightly. “An accountant will tell you that it’s the effective tax rate that counts more than the marginal rate. That’s the bottom line. So, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were high marginal tax rates, but the rich had so many tax write-offs available to them that it reduced their effective tax rate to about 30 – 35% (Source).”

Abel argued, “Well, that’s still higher than the current effective rate, about 25% (Source). I mean, back in 1980, the top 1% got about 10% of all the income in the country. Now, they get like 20% (Source, Slide 11).”

Cain raised his eyebrows. “And how much has their share of taxes gone up? The Tax Foundation analyzed income tax data from the IRS for 2022. The top 1% had 22% of adjusted gross income but paid 40% of income taxes. The bottom 50% had 10% of the income but paid only 3% of the tax (Source). So, the top half are paying almost all of the income tax burden but liberals like AOC and Bernie Sanders don’t think they are paying their ‘fair share.’”

Abel argued, “Well, the earned income tax is a refund of taxes to those families in the bottom 10%. That distorts the figure for the lower half of incomes. I’ll bet if the earned income tax credit were excluded the bottom half pay a lot more than 3%.”

Cain shook his head. “The credit is about 2% of income taxes collected (Source). That will make only a slight difference in the percentages. The fact remains that the top half are carrying all of the burden already. And another thing. The federal government collected 20% of GDP in 2022. That’s already more than 10% above the long-term average. The government is already taking a big chunk of taxpayer money and still running up big deficits. The problem is spending, not taxes.”

Abel rolled his eyes. “The problem is inequality. Higher taxes help tackle that problem.”

Cain shook his head. “Economic growth and higher productivity helps tackle the problem. Hey, change of subject. I wanted to ask you about the abortion decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court a few weeks ago. Did you have a chance to dig into that?”

Abel looked into the distance as he tried to recall. “Oh, yeah. That state’s Supreme Court held that an 1849 law banning abortion had been implicitly repealed by subsequent laws. I had never heard of ‘implied repeal’ of a law. It’s when a legislature doesn’t expressly repeal a law but passes a number of laws afterward that can only be valid if the first law is assumed to be void. Therefore, an implicit repeal.”

Cain smirked. “Declaring a law void seems to me like the judiciary was overstepping its bounds.”

Abel nodded. “It was a 4-3 decision and boy, the dissent from the conservative minority made that point very passionately. The majority used a 1941 decision from that same court and, wait, I’ve got it here. Back in 1941, the court said that it had a duty to treat conflicts in separate laws as though both were operative, ‘if possible.’ Note the ‘if possible’ part. So that court stressed that implied repeals should only be recognized, another quote, ‘when the intent of the legislature clearly appears’ (Source).”

Cain sighed. “Let me guess. The conservatives didn’t think that the subsequent laws demonstrated the clear intent of the legislature.”

Abel shrugged. “Right. Those subsequent laws were passed after Roe v Wade. So, of course, the legislature treated the 1849 law as moot because the Roe decision said those abortion laws were unconstitutional. Would those laws have been passed if the Roe decision had not been handed down? Like so many things in this life, it’s not so clear.”

Cain frowned. “The Roe decision sparked a resistance movement among conservatives. A decade later, John Leo founded the Federalist Society (Source). To the conservative justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe basically invalidated, or lessened the significance of those laws passed after Roe.”

Abel said, “The majority quoted a Pro Publica article that sepsis cases were up 50% since Texas outlawed abortion after Dobbs. Maternal deaths were up by a third (Source). So the majority was also considering the consequences of their decision. A few weeks ago, I was talking about Justice Breyer’s book Reading the Constitution. He wrote about the struggle in judicial interpretation. Rules or values. Breyer chose values. Conservatives prefer rules. Breyer would consider whether the consequences of a decision undermined the values a law protected. Conservatives preferred rules with less regard for consequences. Breyer and Scalia would often debate in public on these types of interpretation.”

Cain smirked. “In last year’s presidential immunity cases, the conservatives were all about consequences. In oral arguments, Gorsuch said he was looking past the actions of Trump because the court was writing ‘a rule for the ages’ (Source). What pomposity. Like they were handing down the Ten Commandments.”

Abel rolled his eyes. “Yes, but only conservative decisions are rules for the ages. Apparently not the Roe or Casey decisions that validated a right to have an abortion. Not guns laws or campaign finance laws. These conservative justices demonstrate such a lack of consistency and clarity in their decisions. Anyway, I wanted to get your feedback on the Big Bogus Bill, as you call it.”

 Cain replied, “Well, I hate this kind of legislation no matter which party pushes it through. Reconciliation bills are a grab bag of legislative candy. Who invented the reconciliation process? Democrats, of course. My biggest objection is that the bill increases the deficit when the economy is good.”

Abel interrupted, “The federal debt gets larger every year, the rich buy that debt, and the federal government pays those rich people interest on the money it didn’t tax them. It’s a reverse tax, like an unearned income tax credit for rich people.”

Cain smiled. “That’s one way of looking at it. But remember that, when Trump left office in 2020, the interest on the debt was 15 cents for every dollar the federal government collected. When Biden left in 2024, it was 22 cents of every dollar (Source).”

Abel argued, “Well, the interest on the debt was relatively a lot worse under Reagan, Bush and most of Clinton’s term. What’s happened since then? Twenty years ago, Republicans started giving away tax cuts to rich people.”

Cain replied, “Whoa, there, pardner. All the entitlement programs that liberals passed have been the main contributor to the debt, if you ask me. We talked about this last week. Medicaid spending is up to a trillion by now. That’s more than 3% of the country’s GDP. In 1990, we spent five times as much on defense as on Medicaid. Now they are almost equal (Source). This country needs to have a conversation about our priorities.”

Abel sighed. “Health care is an implied right. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not possible without health care.”

Cain argued, “Defense is an explicit right. The founders stated that in the first sentence of the Constitution (Source).”

Abel interrupted, “And the general welfare was in that same sentence. Health care is a key component of the general welfare.”

Cain shook his head. “They meant the common welfare, the welfare common to everyone.”

Abel showed exasperation. “We argued about this last week and how many times before that? What does ‘general welfare’ mean? So, didn’t you like about the bill?”

Cain replied, “I thought it was dumb that they are cutting back on incentives for wind and solar energy. I’m an ‘all of the above’ guy when it comes to energy. So is Texas, a red state.”

Abel rolled his eyes. “The White House says that they are reducing energy costs by expanding fossil fuel production (Source).”

Cain smirked. “Fine, but why hobble wind and solar production? It’s stupid. It’s just vindictive politics. I’m sick of this childish shit from people who are supposed to be the leaders of this country. This is the kind of stuff kids in middle school do.”

Abel replied, “Seniors get an extra tax break. An older couple can deduct almost $48,000 (Source). According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, 14% of seniors were poor, so this might help reduce that. Help them pay for medical expenses (Source).”

Cain shook his head. “I liked the simpler deduction in the 2017 so I’m glad they kept that. The extra deduction for seniors won’t help poorer seniors much. This deduction basically eliminates income taxes for seniors in the bottom 50% who barely pay income taxes as it is (Source). Poor seniors won’t get a refund if their taxable income is negative. It’s seniors in the top half who will benefit most from the extra deduction. This government already gives plenty to seniors. Too much, if you ask me.”

Abel asked, “Did you see anything you liked?”

Cain replied, “I like the ability to fully expense short-term capital investment. Better allowances for depreciation which is pretty high in tech industries. The Tax Foundation has an article and video explaining some of the good, bad and ugly in the bill (Source).”

Abel asked, “What about the work requirement? Like half the people who are aged 50-64 and on Medicaid are disabled (Source). Ok, maybe some can work. Can they work 20 hours a week to stay on the program? Who knows?”

Cain nodded. “I liked the discipline of it, but they went overboard. Do the states have the resources to monitor all these requirements? No. Does the law give the states some flexibility or specific funding to carry out the law? No. This is another one of those unfunded federal mandates. It’s sad to see Republicans using the Democrats’ playbook.”

Abel said, “I wish Murkowski had not buckled to pressure and just voted no on that bill. She said she didn’t like the bill but hoped that the House would change some provisions. What kind of spineless response is that? The Tax Foundation estimated that continuing these tax cuts will add $4.5 trillion to the debt over a ten-year window (Source). A bunch of old people in Congress passing laws that benefit the rich and the old, then sticking our kids with the bill.”

Cain smiled as he glanced at his watch. “That reminds me. I can’t remember whose turn it is. I got to go help my daughter with something.”

Abel replied, “Yours. Hey, I hear people like the new Superman movie. A story about someone who acts on principle rather than political expediency.”

Cain laughed as he slid out of his seat. “Most of us try to live up to our principles. Yet we have leaders who pay more attention to political expediency than principles.”

Abel looked up at Cain. “The saying goes, ‘you can’t govern if you don’t win.’ Unfortunately, our political system and news cycle focuses on the contest, the winning, rather than the principles.”

Cain nodded as he turned to leave. “Hmmm, something to think about. I’ll see you next week.”

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Image by ChatGPT

The Soul of a Debate

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November 3, 2024

By Stephen Stofka

This week’s letter is about the principles and history of the debate on abortion, an issue that could be pivotal for Democrats in this week’s election results. Like many contentious policies, many of us have strong opinions on the subject. We have identified the central principle of the issue and brook no compromise on that principle. Such issues generate persistent conflict because we identify different principles and construct incompatible resolutions. The aim of this essay is not to change anyone’s mind on the topic because I don’t think that is possible.

Many laws banning abortion were passed at a time when women had no autonomy – not the right to own property or vote. They were subjects of men. Their chief function was to support and aid men, to bear and rear the offspring of men. To be subject to this demeaning legacy once again deeply offends many women.

The laws and religious doctrines on abortion were all created by men who showed more concern for their offspring than the women who bore that offspring. Greek philosophers and early Church fathers formulated their speculations and doctrines without any knowledge of genetics or embryology. Central to their debate on the matter was the question: when does a fetus become a human and acquire some guarantee of life in a society? The Greek philosopher Aristotle reasoned that all living things had a soul. “The soul is the cause and source of the living body,” he wrote, so that what distinguishes the living from the non-living was ensoulment, acquiring the presence of a soul. What distinguished human beings from other living things was the development of a rational soul within a woman’s womb, but Aristotle was unclear on the timing of that transition.

For early Church fathers, the bible did not resolve the question. Many people think that the Bible specifies the quickening when the fetus first stirs in the womb. However, the word quickening in the Bible is an animating event, not a specific time in gestation. The Bible gives no direct timeline when the soul enters the body. If the Bible is the word of God, as some believe, then God is concerned with many issues but not ensoulment or abortion.

Jerome of Stridon (c. 344 – 420) was an early Christian priest and historian who first translated the Bible into Latin. He professed a belief or doctrine called creationism. At conception, God created a new soul for each person. In Summa Theologica, the influential Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) reiterated that doctrine. Aquinas also reacquainted Christian readers in Europe with the recently “rediscovered” works of Aristotle. In de Potentia, he wrote about Aristotle’s distinction between a primitive vegetal soul and a rational soul. During the Renaissance these philosophical speculations provoked controversy in the Church which Pope Pius IX resolved in 1869 with an encyclical declaring that ensoulment happened at conception.

Many 19th century state laws that ban abortion are based on the belief contained in that encyclical. The resulting policies treated an embryo’s life as though the embryo were human. Texas is one of 13 states that ban abortion outright. All of the former Confederate states effectively ban abortion, either outright or by imposing severe gestational limits when many women may not know they are pregnant. Before Jane Roe won her suit against Texas in the Supreme Court in 1973, the Texas penal code governing abortion was based on Texas laws passed beginning in 1854, when blacks and women were excluded from voting. Blacks were regarded as chattel to be bought and sold like farm animals. Few women could own property, and none could vote.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court established a balancing of state interests between “protecting the health of pregnant women and the ‘potentiality of human life’” (Oyez link here). That balance changes during the progression of a pregnancy. Jane Roe claimed a right to privacy inherent in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments but the court’s decision founded its decision on a woman’s right to privacy implied in the 14th Amendment. The Roe opinion placed bounds on a state’s interest that were loosened during the term of pregnancy:

“In the first trimester of pregnancy, the state may not regulate the abortion decision; only the pregnant woman and her attending physician can make that decision. In the second trimester, the state may impose regulations on abortion that are reasonably related to maternal health. In the third trimester, once the fetus reaches the point of “viability,” a state may regulate abortions or prohibit them entirely, so long as the laws contain exceptions for cases when abortion is necessary to save the life or health of the mother.”

At that time, a fetus was not viable until the 26th week, the end of the second trimester. Medical knowledge and technical development have lowered the threshold of fetal viability to 23 or 24 weeks in developed countries.

In the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson opinion, the court’s majority overturned the precedent established in Roe and a subsequent case called Planned Parenthood v. Casey.  In Dobbs, the majority found that the only implicit rights – not those expressly stated in the Constitution – that any American has are those “rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition”  and necessary to the “concept of ordered liberty” (text of majority opinion here and see notes below on ordered liberty). The phrase is copied from a 1997 Supreme Court decision asserting that the 14th Amendment did not imply a right to assisted suicide. The circumstances and principles of a person nearing death and living outside a womb bear little resemblance to those of an embryo totally dependent on its mother for its life functions. The balancing test in the court’s Roe decision recognized a state interest in preserving life but imposed bounds on that state interest. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote, “Today, the Court discards that balance.” In doing so, the Dobbs opinion discarded the bounds on the power of the state established in Roe.

In the 165 years since the Civil War, the Constitution was reconstructed by the 14th, 15th, 17th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments, expanding the democratic franchise from a select few males to most adults. Are women to be governed by laws specific to them in which they had no voice or representation?

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Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Keywords: abortion, ensoulment, soul, viability, quickening

Ordered liberty is a theme of the conservative 18th century British politician Edmund Burke. In an age when only a small portion of the population could read, a select elite did the ordering of the liberties of the rest of the citizens.

A Golden Age

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By Stephen Stofka

October 6, 2024

This week’s letter is about Golden Age voters. There are two types:

  1. those who think that the past was better than the current age,
  2. those who believe that the future will be better than the current age

The first type are deteriorationists. The more common term is pessimists. The second type is what 19th century writers called perfectibilians, or perfectionists. I will discuss the first type in this week’s letter and continue with the  second type in next week’s letter.

The concept of a Golden Age is a framework of interpretation. What’s that? Imagine two voters who witness an event, like the TV coverage of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Let’s say that both voters have a similar recognition of the event, meaning that both voters acknowledge that the event happened. (Many times, voters do not share this critical first step, acknowledging that an event happened). Interpretation assigns context to an impression, the raw sensory data we receive, to provide an understanding of the event.

An impression like a sight or sound may happen in an instant. Through technology we can slow that instant down to a sequence of still pictures or an audio playback. It is here that we may reassess our initial impression. Director and writer Michael Antonioni explored this theme in his 1966 movie Blow Up (Spoiler alert in the notes).  In baseball, umpires may overturn a called out when slow motion instant replay reveals that the runner’s foot touched the base a microsecond before the baseball entered the baseman’s mitt.

Interpretation is the active construction of a story surrounding the impression. The sound of several sharp cracks in the air. That’s the impression. Fireworks or gunshots? That’s the story. We think it was fireworks and we relax. Then we hear screams following the sharp cracks. Fireworks or gunshots? The sequence of impressions causes us to change the story. We reinterpret the initial sounds as gunshots and look for cover. Many of can reach consensus over an immediate and short sequence of impressions. We are less likely to tell similar stories when there is a complicated sequence of events over time.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the shortcuts we take to make decisions. Daniel Kahneman wrote an entire book Thinking Fast and Slow about our use of these heuristics. As related events unfold, our interpretations of events becomes a Tower of Babel, the Biblical origin story for the thousands of languages that humans have evolved. As interpretations multiply, interpretive frameworks help to coalesce the many into the few. Some frameworks like conspiracy theories satisfy our innate drive to understand the cause of a particular event like 9-11 or the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Central to many conspiracy theories are intention, design and collaboration. They do not include randomness, hubris and human folly.

Many popular love songs longingly remember a Golden Age in a couple’s relationship. Some older people look back with nostalgia on the 1950s as a time of American values and prosperity. The earliest writings of human history imagine an idyllic era in the past. A paradise was corrupted by humans and the result is a fallen world. In the 8th century BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod imagined human history as a succession of ages of decline after a Golden Age. Egyptian literature tells of a paradise where gods and humans lived together. Some accounts imagine an idyllic paradise ruined by a single human act. The Bible tells the story of a Garden of Eden where all wants were satisfied until Eve was tempted to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Her hubris and disobedience caused God to evict her and Adam from the garden paradise. The Greek myth of Pandora’s box echoes that theme. When Pandora disobeys and opens a box she is told not to open, all known evils are unleashed upon the world.

Some voters interpret current events within this context. There was a time in the past when certain values were cherished and practiced by many good people, they believe. New ideas have taken hold of the country’s institutions and corrupted people’s virtues. Someone gains prominence and power by promising to restore the country to a more virtuous or prosperous state. A key word is again. In 1979, Khomeini returned from exile to restore Islamic virtue and practice to Iran. In 1933, Adolph Hitler promised to restore dignity to the German people and restore the lands held by the Germanic tribes in antiquity. In 2016, Donald Trump promised to restore traditional American virtues and lead an army of supporters to make America great again. Three very different people and circumstances who used the appeal of again.

For this type of voter, restore and again are key words. They rally supporters of policies regarding hot button issues like abortion. Example: in 2016, Donald Trump had the support of legislators and religious groups who wanted to restore the abortion issue to the states. These key words help join a group of voters who share a similar outlook. Next week, I will look at those voters who look to the future as they interpret current events.

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Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

Spoiler alert!!!! – In the 1966 movie Blow Up, an expanded photo of a scene in a park reveals a murder taking place in the background.

The Party Swamp

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June 30, 2024

by Stephen Stofka

This week’s letter is on expectations and alliances. After separating voters into two parties, alliances within each of the parties coalesce to form intra-party squabbles. These alliances can form despite radically different approaches to managing problems: analytical and instinctual. Voting for the same candidate might be a person with an instinctive dislike of government and a business owner who estimates the impact of that candidate’s policy preferences on a company’s bottom line. These two different approaches also produce conflict.

In past weeks I have distinguished between expectations and anticipations, the first being more analytical and the second more imaginative or instinctual. The two work symbiotically in our individual lives but that symbiosis becomes outright conflict in a group. Some prefer a more analytical approach to discussing and solving problems while others rely on their gut, their moral compass. Individuals participating in that debate want to convince others to adopt their perspective and values. Perspective evolves over our adult lifetime and its purpose is to protect our values which have evolved since childhood. Attacking a person’s perspective can be perceived as an attack on their values, so we are resistant to persuasion. A variation of a 17th century quote goes, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” The trick to persuasion is to insert your argument into another person’s perspective like a key and let them turn the key.  

In the Democrat Party, the center left contends with the radical left who weaponize shame. Advocates of DEI funding and mandates within all public institutions honestly believe that such training will moderate or eliminate racist attitudes. The majority of U.S. colleges and universities require students to take these non-credit classes to graduate. For students with a heavy academic schedule and work commitments, the burden of that mandate multiplies a student’s stress. Those within and without the academic community debate the conflict between these mandates and academic freedom.

Those favoring more spending on affordable housing disagree with voters in the party who prefer the personal space buffer that R-1 Single Family Home zoning gives residents. Proponents of free needle exchange must overcome fears that such tolerance will introduce a moral hazard that promotes more rather than less drug use. Supporters of more resources for  immigrant housing, job and medical services encounter principled opposition from those who are mindful of the resources and money that must be diverted from other programs. Should the needs of newcomers take higher priority than those of long- time residents, particularly the descendants of those African-Americans brought to this country centuries ago? Party leaders struggle to manage these ideological conflicts because these issues permeate the leadership ranks as well.

The Republican Party is more dominant in the ex-urban and rural parts of each state. Party leaders and candidates express strong support for religious faith as a cornerstone of American society. According  to Pew Research, Republicans attend church more often than Democrats or Independents but the majority of Republican voters do not attend church weekly. Like Democrats and Independents, a third of Republicans rarely step inside of a church. Those who believe that public institutions should be secular confront those who think religious principles and doctrine offer the only sound foundation to good governance. A person supporting their argument with Bible verses may truly believe that they are taking an analytical approach. In their belief framework, the Bible is history, recorded by various authors or sources but inspired by God himself. To those devotees, the Bible is fact, not an arbitrary assembling of oral traditions and myths. Two Republican voters, each with very different religious beliefs, practices and priorities still vote for the same candidates and issues. Leaders within the party must negotiate a compromise between Christian compassion and checkbook constraints.

Immigration is a key issue on ideological lines even though most immigrants initially settle down in urban areas where political sentiments skew Democratic. When the labor market is strong in the U.S. relative to other countries, that acts as a draw to legal and illegal immigration. The emphasis is on the “relative to other countries” part. A mismatch in labor market demand between the U.S. and neighboring countries is an important contributor to immigration flows. The strong economy in the late 1990s and early 2000s attracted a surge of immigrants, far more than today’s levels when adjusted for population.

 A recent analysis by the Federal Reserve estimated that restrictive immigration policies from 2017 to 2020 made it moderately more difficult for employers to fill job vacancies.  Farmers and ranchers, a strong Republican cohort, have long lobbied for changes to the H-2A “guest worker” program that would help them meet seasonal worker demand. The number of slots for foreign workers is not enough to meet demand and the application process is burdensome. Employers have similar complaints about the H-2B program for non-agricultural workers, and are heavily used by janitorial and landscaping services. Regardless of the impact of restrictive immigration policies on their businesses, owners may still vote for a candidate who promotes an immigration crackdown.

Jobs and sustainable wages are the cornerstones of family support, individual self-respect and autonomy. Those in rural areas are keenly aware that urban areas offer a more developed communications and transportation network that attracts companies, jobs and talent. For the past several decades, small to medium-sized manufacturing has migrated to foreign markets which offer lower labor costs. The influx of immigrants is yet another potential threat to community stability and resources. Long established immigrants who came to the U.S. through a legal process may not feel welcoming to those who have jumped ahead in the immigration line.   For decades, rural areas have fought to retain businesses and develop more jobs at a sustainable wage. Those who advocate more government spending on infrastructure to attract businesses clash with those having an ideological preference for laissez-faire markets.

Candidates within each party search for and exploit the shifting alliances within their party’s voters. Challenges to incumbents emerge not from the other party but from a primary election by a candidate in their own party. Primary elections attract only a small percent of party faithful whose political passion gives their small numbers a lot of leverage within the party. Fringe candidates with less funding can appeal to special interest groups to further an agenda with a dedicated party base. A candidate can appeal to a single-issue like abortion, immigration, or project a no-nonsense, get-tough persona and attack an incumbent who compromised on a piece of legislation. A Representative must learn to manage different sets of alliances: those in their district and state, and those in Washington. Next week, I will look at several Representatives and how they have navigated relationships of political power within their party.

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Photo by Ryan Noeker on Unsplash

The Womb Tax

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December 5, 2021

by Stephen Stofka

This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments (Oyez, 2021) in a case called Dobbs v. Jackson that involves a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks. Current practice is about 24 weeks, the point of viability when current medical technology can keep a fetus alive outside the womb. Two Constitutional lawyers discuss the issues on the National Constitution Center’s podcast We the People (2021). Also this week I was reading about an 18th century British property tax that was based on the number of windows in a home. The more windows the higher the tax. What similarities does the Mississippi law have with a tax?

In 1696, King William III enacted a progressive property tax. Poor people usually lived in homes with fewer windows so the tax was based on the number of windows. There was no tax on a house with up to 9 windows. In the 1750s, the tax on the 10th window was $7.47 per window for all the windows, $75 in current dollars (The National Archives, 2021). In the 1770s, Adam Smith (2009) noted that this was the approximate weekly wage for a mason. A house with 15 windows or more was charged $11.22 for each window so that the marginal increase in tax for the 15th window was $63.72. What did people do? They boarded up some of their windows to avoid some or all of the tax. In an age with indoor fires for cooking and heating, this reduced the flow of fresh air in a home and led to disease and death from asphyxiation. In 1851, the tax was repealed.

A tax is a compulsory payment for the support of  government. A state ban on abortion compels a woman to carry a baby to term. Any loss of work income is an economic cost that a woman must bear in support of the state’s interest, using that term in a general sense (Hudson, 2019). The state claims an interest but does not pay a woman for the rental of her womb to perform that service. Is that a violation of the takings clause (Epstein & Peñalver, n.d.) in the 5th Amendment or is a rental of a womb not a permanent taking? When a state leases a building from its owner, the state pays the owner for the use of the building. Is there an implied contract when the state leases a woman’s womb to carry out the state’s interest?

The tiered structure of the British window tax has some similarities to the Mississippi law. The state does not impose a tax on the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. At the 16th week, the marginal effect of the tax is substantial. A woman must leave the state to seek abortion services, seek other intervention or continue with the pregnancy. A woman bears a considerable expense in raising a child. Economists distinguish between the statutory incidence and economic incidence of a tax. The statutory language states which party remits the tax. The economic incidence is who bears the impact of the tax. A tax on cigarettes is remitted by the retailer to the state – that’s the statutory language – but the impact, the payment, of the tax is on the consumer.

Unlike the window tax, the womb tax is selectively applied only to wombs capable of bearing children. Owners of a home in 18th and 19th century Britain could board or brick up some windows to avoid or reduce their property tax. That action could be undone if the owner wanted to pay the tax. A woman can only have her womb removed if she does not want to make it available to the state. If several thousand women were to dump their wombs – or some symbolic semblance thereof – on the steps of the Mississippi statehouse, legislators might understand the impact of this womb tax.

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Photo by chris robert on Unsplash

Epstein, R. A., & Peñalver, E. M. (n.d.). The Fifth Amendment Takings Clause. Retrieved December 04, 2021, from https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation/amendment-v/clauses/634

Hudson, D. L. (2019). Substantial government interest. Retrieved December 04, 2021, from https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1615/substantial-government-interest. Constitutional lawyers distinguish three levels of state interests: legitimate, substantial and compelling.

National Constitution Center. (2021). National Constitution Center. Retrieved December 04, 2021, from https://constitutioncenter.org/

The National Archives. (2021, February 01). Window tax. Retrieved December 04, 2021, from https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/georgian-britain-age-modernity/window-tax/. Note: the 6d per window tax is £.025. I used the Bank of England CPI calculator (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator) to convert pounds in 1750 to 2020 pounds. A pound today is worth $1.32. Also, see this blog for some fun facts https://sashwindowspecialist.com/blog/history-of-window-glass/

Oyez. (2021, December 1). Dobbs v. Jackson. Retrieved December 04, 2021, from https://apps.oyez.org/player/#/roberts12/oral_argument_audio/25307

Smith, A. (2009). Wealth of Nations. New York: Classic House Books. Smith discusses wages in Part 1, Chapter 10.

Revival

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March 8, 2020

by Steve Stofka

A heartfelt endorsement by veteran S. Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn ignited a outpouring of voter support for Joe Biden in that state’s primary a week ago. Mr. Biden rode that momentum into Super Tuesday a few days later and the campaign that was on life support became the leading candidate in the Democratic race.

The following day the stock market rallied a whopping 4%. Big investors know that Mr. Biden will not make life difficult for them. He is old school. He knows that there are two sets of rules and the rich write the rules. Mr. Sanders makes Wall St. uncomfortable because he also knows that there are two sets of rules. He wants to write a new rule book where the rich don’t write the rules. That’s bad for rich people. Here’s why.

Bernie Sanders is often branded as a socialist. He brands himself with the qualifier Democratic Socialist. As the Wall St. Journal’s Richard Rubin pointed out this week, Mr. Sanders is not proposing a European model of socialism (Rubin, 2020). Those progressive systems are funded by a regressive sales tax called a VAT (Wallop, 2010). This tax burden falls mostly on middle class and working families. Mr. Sander’s plan funds progressive programs with progressive taxes falling mostly on the wealthy. That ain’t socialism. We need a naming contest for a system where the wealthy do extra to help the community. Four syllables or less. I’d suggest Neighborism based on the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” with Jimmy Stewart. What’s your suggestion?

Last month President Trump launched a political tweet missile at the Supreme Court (Baker, 2020). This past week Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hand carried his warning to the steps of the Supreme Court. He was part of a protest regarding a current course case that tests the court’s earlier decisions beginning with Roe v. Wade almost fifty years ago. Chief Justice John Roberts has admonished President Trump, Mr. Schumer and others that they should not threaten the Supreme Court. Mr. Schumer says he regrets his remarks (Pecorin, 2020). President Trump last apologized for his remarks when he was in the first grade.

The high court’s Bush v. Gore decision chose the outcome of the 2000 Presidential election and tarnished the court’s reputation as an objective body. Since the beginning of his tenure as Chief Justice in 2005, Mr. Roberts has tried to resuscitate the court’s reputation. In this age, tarnished reputations stay tarnished.

Was the court ever impartial? Over a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein sparked a revolution in physics with a set of mathematical equations which showed that impartiality was impossible. Our observations and conclusions are based on our frame of reference. In the past century an overwhelming body of evidence has substantiated Einstein’s claims.

A central proposition in physics has spread to the humanities. Is this a “hey man, everything is relative” moment? No. Understanding an argument’s frame of reference takes time and research. Most of us are too pressed for time and tend to discard arguments that we don’t instinctively like. Chief Justice Roberts maintains that the members of the high court are not prone to this common human fallibility. Do they cast aside the ideological framing they have formed during their life and career and reach a deliberative decision that fully balances all the considerations of a case before the court? No, of course not. Mr. Roberts is still living in a Newtonian world of imagined impartial justice. Perhaps he should remove his robe while shaving and see the man reflected in his mirror.

A long time ago, my sales manager said to me, “Either you believe in your own b.s. or someone else’s b.s. Wouldn’t you rather own it?” This week Mr. Biden looked like a man who owns someone else’s b.s. – that of Jim Clyburn and the folks in S. Carolina who gave Mr. Biden a sense of confidence. His walk up the stairs to a stage platform has grown more vigorous since Super Tuesday. His voice projects with a confidence and assuredness that I didn’t hear just two weeks ago. He no longer sounds like a frail man. I’m still not convinced he owns his b.s., but he may get there in the next few months.

Mr. Sanders, on the other hand, is a man who has owned what he says for decades. As an Independent, he has played a minor role in the Democratic political hierarchy despite his many years in the Senate. Will voters choose the man of measured manner, Mr. Biden, or put their money on the impassioned and principled Mr. Sanders?

I wish my teachers had told me that I needed to be 70+ to run for President. We have too many old people in Congress. I thought so when I was young. I think so today. Yes, old people have experience, sagacity and some have a more measured temperament. The age of the people we send to represent us in Washington does not reflect us.

The Congressional Research Service recently computed the average age of the House at nearly 58 years; of the Senate, 62 years (Manning, 2018). According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. population – including children – has a median age of 38 (2019). If we take out the 25% of the population under 18, a reasonable estimate of the median age of adults might be an age of 50, ten years younger than the current average age of the members of Congress.

Patrick Leahy, the other Senator from Vermont, has held his seat for almost half a century. They come to Washington and die in Washington. They believe that they have earned an objective wisdom through their long service in their seats. To paraphrase Socrates, the man who thinks he is wise is a danger to himself and others. Step aside. Let the young blood walk the halls and make a different set of mistakes than the ones you once made. Let go. Our country will be better for it.

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Baker, P. (2020, February 25). Trump, in India, Demands Two Liberal Justices Recuse Themselves From His Cases. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/us/politics/trump-supreme-court.html

Manning, J. (CRS). (2018, December 20). Membership of the 115th Congress: A Profile. Congressional Research Service. Retrieved from https://www.senate.gov/CRSpubs/b8f6293e-c235-40fd-b895-6474d0f8e809.pdf

Pecorin, A., et al. (2020, March 5). Schumer says he regrets comments Chief Justice Roberts called ‘dangerous’ threats. ABC News. Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/chief-justice-john-roberts-calls-sen-chuck-schumer/story?id=69396928

Photo by Louis Velazquez on Unsplash

Rubin, R. (2020, March 6). Bernie Sanders’s Tax Plan Would Be Biggest Expansion of Taxation Since World War II. Wall St. Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/sanders-plan-would-hoist-taxes-11583449105 (paywall).

U.S. Census Bureau. (2019, July 16). Median Age Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/median-age-does-not-tell-the-whole-story.html

Wallop, H. (2010, April 13). General Election 2010: a brief history of the Value Added Tax. The Telegraph. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7582869/VAT-a-brief-history.html

Election Reflections

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August 28, 2016

Let’s pay a visit to an earnest voter…

The Labor Day weekend was a week away and the election campaigns would swing into full gear following the holiday. He had a hard time deciding what to do with his vote in November.  His mom used to make it easy, voting the party ticket no matter what. He heard someone say that they would write in Reagan’s name this election. He told himself that he was more conscientious than that so he reviewed some of the issues.

Climate Change

He thought that climate change was at least partially caused by human activity, so he decided he should probably vote Democratic this election. Republicans were climate deniers, weren’t they?  Hell, some Republicans denied evolution.  Michele Bachmann had announced that she wasn’t running for re-election for her House seat. He thought that she should be put out to pasture where she could do the least harm.  He had read a climate scientist writing that it didn’t matter much anymore, that human activity had already flipped the switch.  Sure, we might be able to make a few small improvements, some amelioration of the damage, but it wasn’t worth arguing with others who preferred to think that climate change was as real as Santa Claus.  What was that song by Chris Rea?  The Road To Hell

White House Short-timers

Obama had a few months left in his second term.  Was he hoping that Iran didn’t do something crazy in the meantime?  Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said (Interview with David Axelrod) that the worst day in an election campaign is the best day working in the White House. Everyday some part of everything that happens in the world came into the White House so the stream of problems was constant.

September was coming up.  Did Obama say a little prayer that there would be no financial crisis like the one that beset former Prez Bush in September 2008?  Bush’s body language in those last few months of his second term screamed out that he wanted to be gone from the flood of problems coming across his desk.  Bush had turned out to be a big government Republican with dramatic big government solutions to the financial crisis.  He had flooded Iraq with lots of cash in 2003.  Then he had wanted $700 billion from Congress.  His Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, had famously handed the Congress a scrap of paper, the most concise emergency bailout plan ever devised.  Hank could have written it on a piece of toilet paper in the men’s room.  $700B!

Rock-em-sock-em big government robot fights for justice

Democrats had been proposing big government solutions to society’s problems for as long as he could remember.  Solutions that cost a lot of money and produced meager or mixed results.  Was it bad execution of a good solution or was it the wrong solution?   The Dems were good at blaming someone or something else when their programs didn’t work very well.  Human greed, Republicans, selfishness, and poverty were the usual suspects.

Republicans blamed most problems on government regulators, Democrats, high taxes, and a loss of Christian values.  Republicans believed that a progressive income tax, the taking of money from one person and giving it to another, was a violation of a person’s property rights.  He agreed with that so maybe he should vote Republican.  But then most Republicans wanted to take away a woman’s right to choose what happened inside of her own body.  That was also a violation of a woman’s property rights, a God given right to privacy. So which property rights should he hope to protect with his vote?  Neither party cared much for the Constitution, that was for sure.

Social mores

At heart he was a classic liberal, or what is now called a moderate Libertarian. Gay marriage, fine.  If transgender people wanted to use the sex of bathroom that they identified with, fine.  His granddaughter had said she didn’t care if some transgender boy wanted to use the bathroom. The stalls had doors.  Dems seemed more libertarian on social issues, but very autocratic on economic issues.  Why couldn’t the Dems or Republicans be libertarian on both social and economic issues?  Because then one of them would be the Libertarian Party, he thought ruefully.  The anti-government anarchists had taken over the Libertarian Party several decades earlier.  Maybe it was time for the moderates to take it back?

Taxes

He didn’t think that politicians in Washington should be using the tax code to correct what they perceived as inequities in society.  It was the Republicans in 2003 who had stopped the practice of penalizing married couples through the tax code.  A Democratic House and Senate had put that one into place in 1971 (1998 article) but it was Nixon, a Republican, who signed the legislation.  Democrats could justify any tax.

The Hammer of God

He didn’t think Bible thumping politicians should be telling us how to live our lives. He was with the Dems on this one.  No, God wasn’t dead.  He was kept alive by politicians who used Him as a rhetorical weapon against the other party. Running for his first term in Congress, Abraham Lincoln, a Whig, had endured accusations that he was not a religious man (Sandburg’s Lincoln bio).  The Whigs had morphed into the Republican Party during the 1850s and now it was the Republicans who used religion as a cudgel against Democrats.  (Obama warning in 2012 race)  Apparently, only Republicans knew God’s will and how to implement it here on earth.  How could he vote for a party that was so conceited and arrogant?

Obamacare

But he also thought that the Federal government had no constitutional right to be telling people that they had to buy health insurance.  Each party wanted to take away people’s rights and freedoms.  As a small employer for several decades, he had often wished that health insurance wasn’t tied to employment. Bigger companies could offer more favorable benefits to good employee prospects, and it was tough to compete with that. Despite his preference for private solutions to societal problems, he wished that there was a program like Medicare for all or no tax write offs for health care benefits.  One or the other.  A public option had been a part of Obama’s 2008 platform (Politifact) but he had not been a particularly strong leader on this one and had encountered resistance from the members of his own party.  The result was Obamacare, a rough draft legislative hodge-podge that was more typical of a preliminary committee product, not a final piece of law.  Democrats just sucked at crafting economic legislation yet, in an ironic twist, they tended to see most of society’s problems as economic ones.  Obama had got his health care legislation passed only to see it used against the Democratic Party in the important census election of 2010, when the Dems lost a large lead and control of the House. Bill Clinton had tried to pass a health care bill in 1993 and lost Democratic control of the Congress to the Republicans in the 1994 election.  The Dems had apparently not learned their lesson.

Security

He couldn’t decide who was going to best keep the country safe.  Republicans seemed to think that Mexicans threatened each American family somehow.  Not all Mexicans, he understood, just illegal Mexicans.  For years, hundreds of thousands of students and visitors had come to the U.S., then overstayed their visas and remained in the U.S. illegally.  According to Republicans, all those other illegals weren’t a problem. Just Mexicans.   The Donald would build a wall.  In 2006, a Republican Congress had approved funds for Homeland Security to build more fences along the southern border.  Neither Democrat or Republican Congresses had been able to move the fence building further along toward actual construction.  Having once solved the problem of building a skating rink in Central Park, the Donald thought that he – and only he – could get this fence thing going.  He wished the Donald good luck in herding 535 fat cats in Congress toward any one project.  As the top Fat Cat, maybe the Donald could make it work.

Crazy vs Experience

Nah, he thought, the Donald was too crazy and inexperienced. Most Presidents were either one or the other, but not both, except for Bill Clinton.  Clinton had been crazy enough to have sex with an intern in the Oval Office and inexperienced enough to propose a universal health care plan.  He had won the Presidency with the lowest popular vote in the country’s history yet Clinton had thought he had some clear mandate. Even strong Democratic control of both the House and Senate could not help him and within two years, Clinton certainly contributed to the loss of  both the House and Senate to the Republicans.

Split the vote

Several decades ago a co-worker had shared his personal voting system.  “Split your ticket in the hope that the government stays split,” the guy had said.  That way the politicians could do the least harm.  Maybe that’s what he would do this election.  His congressional vote didn’t matter.  Few Congressional districts were contested in the general election and his district had voted Democratic for more than forty years.  Republicans would likely keep the House anyway.  Democrats might just take the Senate so he should vote Democratic to make it more likely.  That would help split the Congress.  That still left his vote for President.

Supreme Court

Over and over again he had heard that this Presidential election was a vote for the direction of the Supreme Court for the next decade or more.  His secret hope was that the Court would remain at eight members. If there was no clear majority on the Court then there should be no precedence set in Constitutional law.

Libertarian?

Maybe he should vote for the Libertarian Candidate, Gary Johnson?  Johnson seemed neither inexperienced or crazy other than the fact that anyone who runs as a third party candidate in this country must be crazy.  If the Dems took the Senate, they could simply block any nominee to the court and keep the Court at 8 members.  He could tell himself that a Libertarian vote was a combined nod to both the Democrat and Republican parties.  It would not be first time that he had split his vote but it had been quite some time since it did it in the hopes of a split government.

Baseball

Having resolved all those election issues, he turned his attention to the World Series schedule.  If the series went to seven games, the last game would be played on November 4th, at the height of pre-election coverage and just a few days before the election. (Schedule) If the Cubs were in the World Series for the first time since 1945, the attention of many voters might easily be diverted to the historic match up.  Let’s say the Cubs won the series for the first time since 1908 and let’s imagine that the series went to seven games, with the final game played on Friday, the 4th. KC Royals’ fans had celebrated their 2015 series extra inning win over the Mets just two days after the final game.  He could imagine that millions of Chicago residents and former residents would be there to celebrate the event on Sunday perhaps and the festivities rolling into Monday.  Although Illinois was usually a solid vote for the Democratic Presidential contender, he imagined the possibility that thousands of Illinois voters, distracted by the post-Series events, didn’t vote in Tuesday’s election.  Like Florida in 2000, the results turned on the votes of a few in Illinois and Donald Trump won the Presidency because the Cubs won the series.  Nah, he thought, sounds too much like a bad movie script.

Next week: a troubling long term trend that will hurt many investors

Hillary’s America

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August 7, 2016

Those of us who did not fall asleep in sixth grade civics class remember that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery in this country for almost two hundred years.  (To save some typing, I’ll use DP and RP for the Democratic and Republican parties.) Dinesh D’Souza, the maker of the political documentary “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party” beats us over the head with that party association for about half the length of the film.

The film’s release was deliberately timed for July, coinciding with the conventions of both political parties.  The timing and the strong audience interest surely have the industry’s attention. In almost two weeks, the film had grossed over $5  million, admittedly weak compared to the usual movie offerings from Hollywood.  For a documentary, however, those are strong numbers.  I went to an early afternoon showing on a weekday, expecting a theater of mostly vacant seats.  Instead, I had difficulty finding a seat among a sea of gray haired retirees, the age demographic that votes in consistently high percentages each election.  The person manning the ticket booth later confirmed that the movie was the most popular daytime choice among the twelve movies it was showing.

The movie begins with the conviction and two year imprisonment of D’Souza, who contributed too much money to the campaign of a friend who was running for local office.  An innocent man persecuted by our legal system, we are told.  A sentence that was hardly commensurate with a technical violation of election law.  D’Souza had my sympathies until he attributed his plight to a vendetta by President Obama who evidently orchestrated this judicial persection of D’Souza in retribution for earlier documentaries that D’Souza had created.  What was next, I wondered?  The Illuminati?

Taking notes during the film, I did some fact checking afterwards.  Did D’Souza go to prison for two years?  Not according to this NY Times article.   By law, the judge could have given D’Souza two years but declined to do so.  The details of the trial are here. The reader will see that this was not an innocent mistake of  mistakenly writing one too many checks to a political campaign. The audience is led to believe that several scenes and conversations that occurred inside the jail were during D’Souza’s two year sentence.  They might have happened while he was in detention, not a pleasant experience, for sure, but not two years in prison.

D’Souza makes the claim that Obama rules over an urban plantation of blacks, other minorities and immigrants, following a template laid down by rural southern plantation owners and urban DP politicians.  Obama’s political background is rooted in the state of Illinois where Democratic mayors and a gang of political cronies have ruled Chicago through a system of voter impressment, physically forcing immigrants and blacks to the ballot box. D’Souza neglects to mention that the most corrupt mayor of Chicago was “Big Bill” Thompson, a Republican whose two terms during the Prohibition era set the template of power and corruption that marked successive administrations in the city. But this is not a Republican Party hatchet job, is it? More inconvenient facts, darn it.

D’Souza makes the case that FDR’s reign during the Depression era 1930s marks the beginning of the Democratic theft of America.  Whether it was a theft is a matter of opinion.  As Lincoln did, FDR used the crisis to help rewrite the relationship of the Federal government to the states and its citizens.

During some forty minutes, the movie documents the many horrors of slavery by Democratic landholders. The moral rot at the heart of the DP is evidenced by the election of a savage, ruthless man to the highest position in the land.  Andrew Jackson was a Democratic President who treated his slaves worse than farm animals and forced Indian tribes on a long death march from their ancestral lands.  The party of slavery and Jim Crow laws now tries to market itself as the champion of blacks and minorities.

As with other documentaries of political propoganda – yes, Michael Moore, I’m talking about you – there are careful omissions of fact and context as well as just plain old sloppy research.  Facts are sacrificed to the cause the film promotes.  D’Souza tells us that Abraham Lincoln started the Republican Party, a falsehood that is easily checked by anyone with a cell phone.  Why tell such balderdash? D’Souza wants to stress that the RP, which began as a friend to the blacks, is still a friend of the blacks and other minorities.

D’Souza notes that it was Republicans who took land from the defeated Democrats after the Civil War and gave it to the blacks who had worked those lands.  On the face of it, this is true.  Now for the rest of the story, as broadcaster Paul Harvey would say. In the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, Republican politicians took over state legislatures and did award white owned farms to the newly freed blacks.  Many blacks, illiterate and unschooled in the management of a farm, lost the newly awarded lands to tax forfeiture.  Republican legislators and their friends were at the courthouse when the lands were auctioned and became the new owners of the land for a paltry sum.  That unlovely coincidence of human greed surpasses all political affiliation.

Emphasizing the point that it is the Democrats who are the party of racism, D’Souza recounts Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s sordid sentiments toward blacks, his endorsement of the KKK and the hosting of a White House screening of the D.W. Griffith film “Birth of a Nation.”  D’Souza includes several clips from the movie to cement the association between the Democratic Wilson and slavery.

D’Souza dramatizes a scene where Wilson repulses the efforts of Ida Wells, a black journalist and activist, who attempted to get the President’s help to stop lynchings in the Democratic South.  Left out is the fact that Wells had been unable to get cooperation in this cause from a Republican President, William McKinley (Source).  In 1918 and subsequent Congresses, there were repeated Republican efforts to pass anti-lynching legislation but they were blocked by Democratic Senators (See notes at end).

The RP is a friend of women as well as blacks, D’Souza tells us.  After all, a Republican Congress passed the women’s suffrage amendment.  What we are not told is that Republicans specifically excluded women from the draft language of the 14th Amendment.  As this historian notes, “History is messy.”  Inconvenient facts are tossed aside to present a consistent narrative with a simple, clear message.  Donkeys bad.  Elephants good.

Although Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, D’Souza reminds us that it was the Republicans who overcame a Senate filibuster of the Act by southern Democrats.  One more reminder in an election season that the RP has been a friend to blacks.  Republican efforts to make voting by blacks a bit more difficult is conveniently left out of the narrative.

D’Souza dismantles the notion of a party switch, the idea that southern racist Democrats switched parties and are now Republican.  To refute this theory popular in Democratic circles , D’Souza shows a graphic of the 1500 KKK leaders and Democratic politicians in the southern states in the 1960s.  After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, less than 1% switched parties.  The graphic is a visually powerful argument but there is little explanatory information with this graphic. What years are compared? Why include the KKK members?  How were the party affiliations of these members checked?  A comparison of election maps before and after the passage of the Civil Rights Act makes it clear that there was a party switch.

In the 1960 Presidential election, most of the southern states, including Johnson’s home state of Texas, voted Democratic. This election map shows the southern blue voting block.  The Civil Rights Act passed in July 1964, a few months before that year’s Presidential election.  Texas stayed with Johnson but five Southern states went Republican, as this election map shows. (You can also toggle the election year above the map.)

In the 1968 election, four of those five southern states voted for George Wallace, the former Democratic governor of Alabama who had refused to integrate public schools in the state. Running as an Independent and a champion of segregation and states’ rights, Wallace won about 10% of the electoral votes, a feat achieved by no third party candidate since. (Map)

Clearly now the southern states were in the hands of Republicans and segregationists. Or were they?  In the 1976 election, many southern states voted for Jimmy Carter, a fellow southerner and the Democratic governor of Georgia. (Map)

The appeal of political propoganda documentaries is that they simplify history by carefully filtering out the confusion of contradictory events and data.  We would all like to disregard the complexity of human behavior, the conflicting loyalties that confirm the chaotic in human affairs.  We want tidy circles, not ragged inkblot shapes.  What keeps historians busy in a lifetime of academic research and study can be easily brushed aside by the makers of message films.  Darn it, we’re still arguing over the causes of WWI  and that was a century ago!

Champions of slavery, tolerant of racist Jim Crow laws and lynchings in the southern states,  the DP has also supported eugenics laws.  D’Souza implies that this is part of a continuing effort to eradicate the black race.  No longer able to use black people as free slave labor, the DP seeks to rid the country of them through sterilization and abortion.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of what is now called Planned Parenthood, was also a champion of eugenics (see here),  as were many progressives.  In today’s political alignment, progressives are part of the DP, but they used to be part of the Republican Party when the eugenics movement first gained popular strength.  Led by President Theodore Roosevelt, the progressive movement was responsible for workplace and social reforms, and the creation of the first national parks.  Eugenics was an “enlightened” and scientific idea at the time, but horrifies us now. Hitler’s devotion to the concept impelled his commitment to the methodical destruction of the Jewish race, and the wholesale slaughter of Slavs and Communists who surrounded and threatened the noble German race.

Linking Sanger with another group devoted to the suppression and eventual eradicaton of the black race, D’Souza shows a picture of Sanger at a KKK rally as proof of her association with the racist group. The researchers at the debunking site Snopes showed that this was a doctored photo .  Sanger did speak before a NJ women’s chapter of the KKK as part of her effort to speak about birth control to as many groups as possible.  In her autobiography, Sanger wrote about the meeting and the strangeness of the experience so D’Souza uncovers no dark and hidden secrets.

Sanger wrote that she wanted Negro parents to have the ability to make the same family planning decisions that white parents did.  She envisioned a day when Negro parents had the same access to hospital services for their births that white parents did.  She wrote ” Some day … there will not be a single section of the country without adequate hospital facilities for all. But until that day is here, Negro mothers should be given all possible protection against needless sacrifice through childbearing.”  Doesn’t sound like someone who wants to eradicate the Negro race, does it?

D’Souza’s message is that abortion and sterilization are the twin weapons of the eugenics movement.  Although sterilization was discontinued after the 1970s, abortion remains a tool of the eugenics movement primarily aimed at black women and the gradual reduction of the black race in America.

As evidence of this, D’Souza notes that the majority of Planned Parenthood (PP) clinics are in black-majority neighborhoods.  Protecting Black Life, a pro-life advocacy group, has an interactive tool using 2010 census figures that verifies the correlation of clinics in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.  With a tendency to have lower incomes, these minority population may simply use PP’s services more frequently, prompting PP to position their clinics in these areas.  Secondly, lease rates are lower in these neighborhoods and are attractive to an organization with constant funding needs.  However, those are boring pedestrian explanations for the correlation of locations.  D’Souza’s more dramatic explanation is that the location of PP clinics is part of a DP master plan of genocide.  Republican presidential candidates Herman Cain (2012) and Ben Carson (2016) have made accusations similar to D’Souza’s (WP article)  Maybe D’Souza will write the next Jason Bourne film?

A conservative propoganda piece must include Saul Alinsky, the anti-Christ of liberal politics who wrote “Rules For Radicals.”  The 1971 book consisted of tactics that a community organizer might use to knit low income communities into a more powerful voice at the political bargaining table. Confrontation and conflict are themes common to many of the tactics.

Political propoganda consists of a series of “dog whistles” familiar to the target congregation.  Conservatives are quick to tar any Democratic politician with the epithet “Alinskyite” as in “Alinskyite ideas.”  The congregation barks with approval.

Obama was only ten years old when Alinsky died in 1972 but Obama was a community organizer who has quoted Alinsky.  The quotes are not direct but close enough that any true conservative can see that Obama is a commie radical like Alinsky.  In Chapter 2 of Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote about the world as it is and the world as it should be. When Obama uses the words “world”, “is” and “should” in the same sentence, he is quoting Alinsky and professing to be a Communist.  I totally get that.  Here is one example of this kind of dogmatic analysis.

In a 1963 speech, President Kennedy – yes, a Democrat – differentiated those who saw the world as it was and asked why, and those who dreamed of what the world could be and asked why not.  His brother, Robert Kennedy, used the phrase as well in several speeches.  In that same speech, JFK  attributed the original quote to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.  Using the logic of this conservative accusation, we can assume that anyone who has dreams about a better world is a disciple of Alinsky and yes, a radical Commie Utopian.

The movie’s title begins with Hillary’s America, so when is D’Souza going to show us Hillary’s secrets?  Why, just about now. Hillary Clinton actually wrote a student thesis on Alinsky.  As president of the student club, Hillary invited Alinsky to speak at Wellesley College. The audience does not have to be good at math to realize that Hillary Clinton = Communist.

As the student commencement speaker at her graduation from Wellesley in 1969, Hillary went off script to chide the guest speaker, Republican Senator Edward Brooks, an African American, about his remarks (Transcript of Hillary’s speech). D’Souza dramatizes it for his audience. White girl at Wellesley rebukes black senator, showing no respect for either his position or his race.  Senator sits quietly in chair on dais as Hillary says these disrespectful words.  Bad Hillary.

Here is a piece of Hillary’s remarks: “we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”  Any conservative can see what she is saying.  We feed her words into the conservative de-confabulator and out pops the translation. She is talking about the world as it is and as it should or could be.  Alinskyite Communist thinking of a better world, for sure.

D’Souza left out the Senator’s remarks that prompted Hillary’s response. Senator Brooke adopted what was a mild authoritarian posture typical of the time.  Student protests against the Vietnam war, discrimination and entrenched power structures occurred almost weekly, it seemed.  He said: “Dissent and protest are essential ingredients in the democratic concoction. Without them an open society becomes a contradiction in terms, and representative government becomes as stagnant as despotism. Yet there is a narrow but distinct line between productive dissent and counter-productive disruption.” (Transcript of Brooke’s speech)

Brooke cautioned against protest for the sake of protest, sentiments that sound reasonable to most American ears today.  Other elements of the speech would be typical of today’s moderate Democrat or Republican, animals who may have been driven to extinction in the current era of polarized opinions.  Only a Republican very secure in his seat would dare to give such a speech today.  Brooke endorsed the growth of the many Federal government cabinets recently created to combat housing and job discrimination, poor education and poverty.  Yes, a Republican endorsing bigger government. He was practically a Socialist in the eyes of some conservatives today! What did bad Hillary find wrong with those sentiments?

Hillary’s response is rather tame for the period when there was open antagonism between the rulers and the ruled. D’Souza uses a snippet of a sentence taken out of context to portray Hillary as an uncivil person with little respect for authority.  That’s the message of this segment of the film.  Hillary bad.

These days ain’t those days.  There, I said that and you can quote me.

Rulers had rigid rules that gave most of society’s power to men, not women.  Hillary spoke for many who wanted a change.

The rulers said war was necessary and that the ruled were supposed to go fight the war to stop Communism.  The ruled were ordered to fight but were not allowed to vote. The ruled broke things in protest.

At the universities, rulers had clearly defined and time honored curricula choices that reflected the prejudices and preferences of past generations.  The ruled wanted a greater voice in curricula selection.

The rulers had a grading system that seemed arbitrary to the ruled.  What is the difference between a B+ and a B paper?  With few consistent rules to guide the grading process, wouldn’t a pass-fail grading system make more sense?  No, the rulers said.  Rulers make the rules and students follow them.  Is that clear?

Those were the good old days.  College students today are surprised when they hear of these old rules, most of which have been either abandoned or dramatically altered.  The ruled stormed the forts of power and the rulers compromised so that they could continue ruling in whatever capacity they could manage.  Some of the ruled became the rulers.

I do encourage the reader to read the speeches of both Hillary and Brooke.  Hillary’s speech is the shorter, for sure, but both speakers are rather moderate and deliberate, remarkable in an age of sometimes murderous (Kent State) and often bloody (Columbia U. and others in NYC, for example) protests.

Having established that Hillary is a socialist, anarchist Communist, D’Souza then shows the tragedy of her personal life.  For several decades she has been covering up for the sex addiction of her husband and former President Bill Clinton.  Democratic Party = slavery = sexual deviants = Communism = Godlessness = bad.

I was busy writing out D’Souza’s equations when I realized that I was going to miss an appointment.  I had to miss the final 15 minutes of the film but I suspect that D’Souza was going to finish with the tragedy at Benghazi and Hillary’s personal email server while she was Secretary of State. If you want to know how the film turned out, you can rent it on Vudu or spend a couple of hours at your local theater.  I have now seen a Michael Moore film and a Dinesh D’Souza film.  As Johnny Cash sang, I walk the line between either extreme.  I hope I can keep my balance.

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Notes:

“We urge Congress to consider the most effective means to end Iynching in this country which continues to be a terrible blot on our American civilization.”  Republican presidential platform, 1920. In the House, Republicans held a 50 seat majority, 240 seats to 192 Democratic seats.  In the Senate, Republicans had won a 49 to 47 majority in the 1918 elections.  Repeated Republican efforts were blocked by Democratic Senators (more here)

The claim that Lincoln founded the Republican party is incorrect.  Here and here.

In Buck v. Bell (1927), the Supreme Court ruled that state sterilization laws were legal.  As further evidence of the DP’s efforts to eradicate the black race, D’Souza notes that it was Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Progressive, who wrote the court’s majority opinion.  D’Souza omits the fact that a Republican President, Theodore Roosevelt, appointed Holmes to the court and a Republican majority Senate approved the appointment.