Burnt Orange Report

Three-For-One Special

By Jim Dallas

Zell Miller, taxes, and religion. Oh my!

Don't get the wrong impression. Just because I'm romanticizing the South (just this once!), ranting about taxes (I rarely do it!), and not in complete agreement with the ACLU (just this once!) doesn't mean I've suddenly gone over to the Dark Side. I promise! Really!

I also quote a lot from the L.A. Times, so obviously I am a liberal.

1. I'm inclined to sympathize with Zell Miller. Just this once.

2. Surely we can do better than the federal income tax?!?

3. A few words about the Pledge and the L.A. case (or, sometimes I'm with the ACLU, and sometimes I'm not.)

Zell

I've said lots of nasty things about Zell Miller here, and here. I stand by my previous assertioon that "I wish Senator Miller didn't have a driving need to make himself the bête noire of Democrats generally and Southern Democrats specifically." Herein is a fuller exposition of that theme.

The L.A. Times has a profile of ZigZag Zell today, which, among other things, profiles why Sen. Miller - one of President Bush's most outspoken (and increasingly obnoxious) supporters - would remain a Democrat:

Growing up in the mountains of northern Georgia, one of the few places in the South with a genuine two-party system back then, partisanship was more than just something a person thought about on election day. Democrats shopped at the Democrat-owned filling station, bought their groceries from a Democratic grocer and were expected to date and marry only members of their own party. Same for the Republicans, going all the way back to the Civil War. "When I meet my maker," the senator says, "I fully expect my mama and daddy to be somewhere close around. And I want to be able to look at them and say, 'Hey, I stayed a Democrat.' "

My grandma and grandpa, both Democrats in northeast Tennessee (which was GOP before the GOP was cool), have been a tremendous influence on my political worldview, and shared many of the same experiences in life that Miller did.

And somewhere along the line I picked up a strong sense of nostalgia for the "old days," albeit not of the same sort of magnitude that seems to animate Zell Miller these days.

Here's what the history books say (and if it looks like I'm cutting selectively, I am, since nostalgia is inherently a selective and biased reading of history):

There was plenty to stimulate their efforts. Regional, ethnoreligious, and economic fault lines ran throughout American society, dividing Democrats from Whigs... What distinguished the parties were their cultural and ideological perspectives. Democrats tended to be drawn from the "outsider" groups in Anglo-Saxon society: the Scots-Irish, Presbyterians, and other nonconforming religious and ethnic groups, who had long been in conflict with the dominant groups in the British Isles. They feared a powerful government and were hostile to the aggressive commercialism of the dominant Anglo-Saxons.

All this gave the Democrats the air of an egalitarian party challenging the nation's ruling elite. The role played by the party's leader, Andrew Jackson, in these efforts differed from earlier ideas of political leadership. He conveyed, by words and deeds, a few simple truths about republican purity and democratic striving and served as the symbol of a Democratic crusade against greed, unfairness, and the domination of a manipulative elite.

And so I look back on this, I gotta ask: ain't these my roots? Ain't these my values? Even through the lens of 150 years of change-for-the-better, and the knowledge that a lot of these roots went rotten with the scourge of racism, hatred, and ignorance, there is still, in this, a strong and powerful bond between their past with my present.

(The history books also say this about the origins of the GOP, which may or may not still be relevant post-Nixon... I'll let you, dear reader, ponder that.)

...A new Republican party shrewdly played on the nativism and antisouthern sentiment to build a movement to resist southern and Catholic "assaults" on the American nation.

It's a universal human desire to want to have an ethnic and cultural identity (see the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 8). It is also worth noting, however, that no romanticizing of the past can make up for past or current moral failings, on either the individual or cultural level. Therfore, it is often necessary to honor the spirit of the past by breaking with those tenets (in this case, most obviously Jim Crow) that contravene contemporary standards of morality and public honor.

(Accordingly, I have no intent to be an apologist for the Dixiecrats or the Confederacy, even if history will specify that as "our" heritage. Confederate flag activists and David Duke make me ill; reason, compassion, and pride ought to animate and inspire people to make the future better than the past.)

Back to the topic. I don't happen to think Zell Miller is (particularly) a vehement racist, statements made years ago (see Carvllle and Begala, Buck Up, Suck Up) notwithstanding.

But...

"In the 1970s, '80s and '90s, nobody labored in the vineyards of the Democratic Party as consistently and loyally, from the national level to the state level, as Zell Miller," said Keith Mason, who served 10 years ago as staff chief to then-Gov. Miller and still regards him with great affection and appreciation. "That's why so many Democrats were surprised when he suddenly and consistently supported the president." Bobby Kahn, the chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, put it more succinctly: "Something went bad wrong."

...

Why Miller chooses to ventilate that anger against his party is a puzzlement to a great many observers. Some plumb for psychological reasons, saying he craves the attention, or wants to get back at those Democrats who talked him out of his contented retirement. Some say Miller has given voice to a sentiment a lot of Democrats feel ? that the party needs to focus more on the kitchen-table concerns of average Americans ? but taken the argument to a reckless extreme. "He's gone from the guy who'd like to see his party changed and turned into the guy who'd like to see his party abolished," said James Carville, the Democratic strategist who helped make Miller governor then, at his behest, helped get Clinton elected president.

Worse perhaps, many Democrats simply dismiss Miller as irrelevant. "If he wanted to get the attention of the party, there are a thousand ways to do that other than endorsing the Republican candidate for president and becoming their attack dog," said Ed Kilgore, who served as an aide to then-Gov. Miller and now directs policy for the centrist DLC. "This isn't having a dialogue with people. This is walking out of the room."

So I have a great deal of sympathy for Zell Miller when we talks about being a Democrat out of affection for the memory of Mama and Papa Miller, and all the Millers from the 1830s to the present day. And affection for the South. And what have you.

Upon serious consideration, I think it would be a mistake to kick Zell out of the party, as some people have suggested.

But I cannot stand, like so many other observers, the fact that he has proceded to go so completely off the reservation (I think Carville hits the nail on the head when he says "he's gone from the guy who'd like to see his party changed and turned into the guy who'd like to see his party abolished").

Taxes

Grrr. I am really starting to hate the income tax. And I just got my tax refund check back, too.

Don't get me wrong; I still believe that the federal income tax is better than any major proposals floated by the Republicans recently. And a state income tax would work wonders for school finance in Texas.

But we're talking about comparing something utterly and completely mediocre with (a) GOP proposals which are, simply, crap and (b) the status quo in Texas, which (sad as it is to say), is crap. Sort of like when Sen. Inhofe compared prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib to prisoner abuse under Saddam Hussein. Excuse me if I cannot summon real enthusiasm for continuing on with a tax which is rapidly becoming the most complex, asinine joke ever told.

The fact of the matter is that any tax on income is going to ultimately require that we define "income." And over the course of the past four years, we've had the President and the Congress continue to whittle down this definition to "earnings from hard work", as inheritance, capital gains, and other forms of non-labor income have gotten exempted. To be fair, this is a proceess that began 75 years ago, but it's now getting outrageous. Coupled with regressive payroll taxes, it's actually the middle class that seems to be paying the highest marginal tax rates. This is bad.

We're getting to a point where we need to explore scrapping the federal income tax in its entirety, for there are more progressive and more common sensical ways to raise revenue.

The Decembrist blogs on a progressive consumption tax. Specifically, he notes a proposal from the New America Foundation that proposes a tax on the amount of money you spend each year (your income minus your net savings). The NAF proposal drew remarks from TNR's Noam Scheiber Kevin Drum and Max Sawicky. A more workable solution might be a modified Value-Added Tax. (Also here, , and here for a different opinion).

Of course, we could also just tax the Almighty Taco, as the Bexar County GOP head recently proposed:

With the dilemma of school finance still unresolved, Bexar County GOP Chairman Richard Langlois proposed a unique solution to the problem: Tax a taco.

"The whole state has tacos, but we have the best," Langlois said. "We could fund the entire state."

A few words on the ACLU

Uggh. The ACLU is embarassing itself over a barely-visible crucifix on the Los Angeles (Calif.) county seal. In case you haven't heard Bill O'Reilly screaming his lungs out about this, take a gander at this editorial right here. The ACLU threatened hell if the county supervisors didn't remove a cross which represents the historical significance of Spanish missionaries founding the city of Los Angeles. Hmm... Los Angeles. Maybe the ACLU will sue LA for pushing angels on us next?

Why can't the ACLU stick to legitimate complaints like the transparently establishmentarian language in the Pledge of Allegiance? Although I doubt the SCOTUS will agree with Michael Newdow, they ought to.

A coherent theory of the Establishment Clause has to rest upon the intent and effect of the alleged slight.

In the LA case, it is pretty obvious that this is simply a recognition of the history of the city and county of Los Angeles. The cross is a convenient way to symbolize a significant part of the region's history, which cannot really be disputed.

It's pretty clear to me also that "under God" in the pledge was added both to assert the supposed religosity of Americans (in contrast to the godless commies). For the Congress to make a claim about the religious character of America in the official Pledge of Allegiance suggests a pretty strong normative, religious claim. Those that claim it is mere "ceremonial deism" are asserting that the Pledge of Allegiance does not mean what it says. That's not exactly comforting as defenses go.

Practics and common sense have whittled down the role of religion in government, which many 19th century Americans expected to be quite large (see Joseph Story's commentaries on the Constitution). Indeed, the role of religion is going to be (and should be) tiny in a liberal republic; but the logic which the ACLU is using in the LA case would whittle it completely out of existence and take out a good bit of freedom of speech as well. Kinda self-defeating if you ask me.

I wish the ACLU would pick their fights more carefully.