Rebut To What Will Happen This Week In Ferguson

It's The Tax Burden, You Hoser!

President Obama’s infamous line “you didn’t build that,” was recently echoed by the equally economically challenged Hillary Clinton when she noted, “Don’t let anybody tell you that, you know, it's corporations and businesses that create jobs.”  Their staff, having to manage the public outcry and snickering, got both of them to walk back the comments but, most likely, what they said originally is what they really believe.

I bring this up because this thinking has become the prevailing viewpoint in the U.S., certainly among the progressives and left-leaners.   I recently had a debate with an old friend who shares the values of Obama and Clinton.  She posted on a social site that we should all boycott Burger King for their unpatriotic reverse repatriation of their new company headquarters.  The move of the hamburger chain to Canada through acquiring a Canadian franchise stirred a lot of emotion among those who would prefer the corporation to stay put and put up with the highest corporate tax rate among industrialized nations. 

In all but a few publications, the storyline was that Burger King shouldn’t be allowed to do this.  But the main story shouldn’t have been about Burger King’s choice to relocate, it should have been a cautionary tale that other corporations are considering the same thing; taking jobs and tax revenue with them.  The U.S. is the only country that taxes corporations on their domestic and foreign profits and, with their take up to 40% (it takes earning $150,000 in profit to get there), it’s double the corporate tax rates of Canada.   The conclusion each of us should have made was whether or not our corporate tax code needs some restructuring.  By lowering rates and just taxing corporate profits based on what they earn in the U.S., a good part of the estimated $4 trillion sitting offshore may make its way into the U.S. economy.

My friend didn’t agree.  It’s her belief that corporations are made up of millionaire fat cats and not stockholders.  And certainly she didn’t believe corporations have accountants and tax specialists that can draw up handy spreadsheets showing how a company can retain more profit based on tax advantages elsewhere, thereby making the shareholders happy and keeping the corporate fat cats around a bit longer.

There was a simple question I asked of her:  If you were offered a job that paid 20% more and all other things were the same, would you consider it?  Of course she said yes, but didn’t want Burger King to have the same option she herself had.  She told me they owed their fair share to the government because they were the users of government services.  She noted BK’s trucks used the interstate highway system to deliver the buns, were all too happy to work with farmers who get public subsidies (not my idea), and who put their children in public schools.  I mentioned there were lots of people on the public dole who pay no taxes, so was she suggesting they should be paying a share of the tax burden – especially because they use the roads, use schools and walk around with Obama Phones?

The most disheartening aspect of this mini-debate and the misguided belief of many of our elected politicians is their lack of understanding of what and who came first.  Yes, through government appropriations, roads, schools and shrines to government largesse were built.  But the government didn’t build them, we did.  Tax dollars paid for all big projects that governments are so proud of.  But the first drawing on the drafting board couldn’t have been done without the first taxpayer.  This isn’t to say that collecting community funds to make the community better isn’t a good thing.  It’s about the ownership, or rather the lack of understanding of who the owners are.

The government didn’t create us; we created government.  Even a bit reluctantly if my take on the Federalist Papers are correct.  The prevailing belief that we are subjects of the government and need to sit down and shut up was the smoldering ember that created the war to rid the continent of the British Monarchy.  You would think the president, among others, would heed the advice of the Spanish philosopher George Santayana who wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

It's Foreign Policy, Stupid

“It’s the economy, stupid,” is a zinger most attributed to Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign to replace George H. W. Bush as president.  It was actually James Carville who uttered those famous words to his campaign staff so they could continue to hammer Bush on the modest recession that was afoot.  The economy did indeed dominate the political rhetoric that year and Clinton’s hammering away on Bush’s handling of 5% unemployment is likely what elected him. 

It also missed the point by a mile on what presidents are supposed to do.  They can create policies to encourage economic growth, as Reagan did, but beyond that, they don’t and can’t micromanage the economy.  What the Framers had in mind for the president was to be an advocate for American influence, protect the American people from enemies, and be the Commander In Chief.  They certainly didn’t think he would end up being something like a greeter at a Costco.

How else to explain that in the midst of a tight election, the leader of the free world, such as it is now, was in a group handshake with doctors in white coats who had just come back from Africa after treating Ebola patients?  To so trivialize the role of the president to settle for a photo op says all too much about what the job has become.

No presidential candidate in the last 30 years knew what was ahead of him or her as they were running for the office.  On domestic issues, they knew they could nibble around some abstract policy agenda and figure they wouldn’t collapse the country.  But none of them could predict what to expect on foreign policy.

When Obama ran for the office in 2008, it was his pledge to end the wars in the Middle East and close down Guantanamo that propelled him into the White House.  Even Hilary’s “3 a.m. wake-up call” didn’t impress the voters.  Obama ran on the same platform of ideas in 2012 and won again on promoting a peaceful world that was just beginning to explode around him.  He’s not the only president that misjudged the events of the world to come; he’s just the poster child for it.

On his watch, and presidents always have to wear these watches, Iraq (and soon Afghanistan) have erupted into brutal violence.  It makes no difference that the previous administration set the stage for this, Obama’s lack of focus on “winning the peace” gives him the hairshirt for it now.  He wears it also for creating the vacuum that has been sucked up by Putin as he saber rattles around anyone he can in search of relevance; for turning his back on Iran and North Korea so he didn’t have to watch them rebuild their nuclear ambition; for another back-turning on our friend the dictator of Egypt to bring in a worse dictator that wanted to bring the country back to the 8^th Century; to having the most blurry “red lines” in the history of red lines that caused friends and enemies alike to snicker and sneer about U.S. influence and power; to alienating our allies and causing one, Saudi Arabia, to say it’s better to be an enemy of the U.S. because they would get better treatment if they were.

One could talk longer on the foreign policy missteps by this president but it would be to miss the point.  Every election may be about breadbasket and pocketbook soundbites by the first Tuesday in November, but foreign policy finds a way to be the dominant issue during the presidency.  Clinton stupidly found out it wasn’t only the economy.  He learned he had to make a tough decision on Serbia and then hid under his desk and left it to Madeleine Albright and Wesley Clark to decide.  George W. Bush ran on the trivial theme of being the “education” president and will forever be known as the architect on the lost war on terror.  Even his father couldn’t have predicted during his election campaign of the changes that were about to come in the geo-political landscape with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and a war that proposed less blurry red lines in Iraq.

Our world is unstable and scant little attention is paid to it during any election cycle – or day after day as there is no real end to the cycle any longer.  Instead of focusing on the supposed war on women, income inequality, Ebola, Obamacare and everything else that pundits say goes bump in the night, the focus ought to be what else could go wrong in the world -- outside our borders.

Foreign-policy planners and national leaders in Moscow, Tehran and Beijing get up every day and do one thing: think about how they can diminish or destabilize the U.S. Our leadership got up every day for six years and thought about . . . wind farms.  This president has two more years to lead this country and he ought to think less about fundraising and local political battles and more about the battles that will be brought in the front door from any of the hot spots in the world.  If he can’t or won’t, Congress should pass a law requiring the president to play golf for the next two years and let somebody else have a go at doing the job.  It couldn’t be any worse.