November
12, 2002 2:40
p.m.
Getting It Almost Right
Politicians
are running from “privatize” and other good words.
n awful problem
U.S. conservatives have when their eyes stray from the heavenly paradigm
to the political trough, is: how-to-say-it? If the descriptive word throws
people off, then political survival requires that it be replaced, or cleaned
up. Artists run into that problem, and are brave enough to abide by the
dictates of cultural integrity when obscenity is at bay. When that happens
nowadays, on the altar of truth and courage, exactly the right word is
given. Everybody with the possible exception of this newspaper will spell
out, Soprano-style, the word that means to copulate, but not many
will write the word Mark Twain used to describe the ethnic background
of Huckleberry Finn's Jim.
That is the kind
of thing — the rejection of the useful word — that has happened
to economic reform. The analysts point out that to "privatize"
Social Security is a devil-formulation, to be resisted by political candidates
to save life and limb. For one thing, the expression — privatizing
Social Security — takes short cuts, because it is nowhere (practically
nowhere) recommended that the whole Social Security account be put in
the hands of the subscriber, to be dealt with as he/she wishes. Reforms
tend not to come in complete packages, Prohibition being the great exception.
Proposals being put forward by contemporary politicians deal with only
one part of the Social Security package — one-eighth of it, in typical
reform talk. The idea being that one part of that accumulating sum of
money should be invested by the Social Security subscriber as individually
desired, though (as in Chile) only in authorized securities — no
wildcat wells, but okay in utilities, insurance, banks, whatever.
The word "privatize"
seemed to convey greed and risk and submission to Snidely J. Whiplash,
the snaky character who sneeringly ties helpless damsels across the railroad
track. The visionary can understand and applaud a total removal of Social
Security savings from federal control, subject only to a regulated withdrawal
rate to meet the requirements of pension disbursement, and providing then
a capital pool that the existing system of course does not provide. But
although in North Carolina under Mrs. Dole and in New Hampshire under
Mr. Sununu, the voters seemed to endorse something in the nature of liberating
one part of the Social Security fund for individual economic deployment,
the politicians shrink from the word privatizing, as they do from "vouchers"
for private schools.
It is so also with
"death duties." It is reassuring that although only 2 percent
of estates pay any death duties, 60 percent favor continuing reforms of
the kind adumbrated by the bill passed two years ago, which, however,
is programmed to terminate in ten years.
Here the devil-words
are: Only the rich stand to benefit. The reason President Bush
is nevertheless intending to persist in death-duty reforms is that there
is an intuitive notion out among the public that it's wrong (wrong is
different from: not-a-good-idea) to tax already-taxed gains. But argument
for total relief suffers, again, from the extremity of the paradigm. The
same problem inheres in the flat tax. The French call it a "fausse
idée claire" — taxing everyone by the same percentage
of their income is a terrific idea, but you are still left with the problem
of welfare for those who cannot provide for their own.
Another reform? The
elimination of any capital-gains tax. What we are hearing now is something
that goes part way — a reduction in the tax from the present level.
To call for an end to it plays into the hands of those dragons who come
snarling to life at any mention of privatizing Social Security, ending
the capital-gains tax, and eliminating its progressive feature.
Years ago a social
philosopher wrote that modern politics has become the substituting of
political for economic means of acquiring wealth. That is so, and the
consequences of it necessarily impinge on Mr. Bush when he lays out his
economic reforms. Those who believe in true equality, which of course
denies different rates of taxation for different scales of earning, have
to wince, and, for relief, direct our eyes back to the heavens, unsullied
by the dross of politics.
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n awful problem
U.S. conservatives have when their eyes stray from the heavenly paradigm
to the political trough, is: how-to-say-it? If the descriptive word throws
people off, then political survival requires that it be replaced, or cleaned
up. Artists run into that problem, and are brave enough to abide by the
dictates of cultural integrity when obscenity is at bay. When that happens
nowadays, on the altar of truth and courage, exactly the right word is
given. Everybody with the possible exception of this newspaper will spell
out, Soprano-style, the word that means to copulate, but not many
will write the word Mark Twain used to describe the ethnic background
of Huckleberry Finn's Jim. 
