Partial Readings: Untouchable Taxes, Mediated Living, Other Facets of War
Partial Readings: Untouchable Taxes, Mediated Living, Other Facets of War
Partial Readings: Untouchable Taxes, Mediated Living, Other Facets of War
Untouchable Taxes
Fred Block revisits Daniel Bell?s prophecy of the new centrality of the tax question
On the one side, postindustrial trends position the state to play a significantly more central role in society, necessitating an increase in public expenditures and taxation….But just as communal needs are expanding, citizens are increasingly likely to see taxes as a direct interference with their own pursuit of happiness. Where these two trends converge, Bell foresaw an ongoing fiscal crisis in which the state would have difficulty raising necessary tax revenues and politicians who sought to strip the public of entitlements were likely to be punished at the polls.
….Bell called for the creation of a new, liberal public philosophy to justify taxation to finance the public sector. Thirty-five years later, we still lack this public philosophy.
Corey Robin argues that Democrats are in part culpable for the ?the last four decades of the right-wing tax revolt?:
Liberals often have a difficult time making sense of these movements?don?t taxes support good things??because they don?t see how little the American state directly provides to its citizens, relative to their economic circumstances. Since the early 1970s, with a few brief exceptions, workers? wages have stagnated. What has the state offered in response?
….And here Democrats like Obama and his defenders, who bemoan the stranglehold of the Tea Party on American politics, have only themselves to blame. For decades, Democrats have collaborated in stripping back the American state in the vain hope that the market would work its magic. For a time it did, though mostly through debt; workers could compensate for stagnating wages with easy credit and low-interest mortgages. Now the debt?s due to be repaid, and wages?if people are lucky enough to be working?aren?t enough to cover the bills.
For an illustration of how the parameters of liberal policy discussion have shifted, read Mike Konczal?s blog post on how Social Security might look if it were designed today, under ?an approach to governance where the state?s role is one of creating and completing otherwise incomplete markets.?
Mediated Living
Digital mapping and GPS are just the beginning of a much larger revolution in technologies designed to facilitate our interactions with places and travel between them. But it is astounding how quickly these technologies have changed one of the most basic aspects of our existence: the way we move through the world. When driving down the highway, you can now expect to see, in a sizable portion of the cars around you, GPS screens glowing on dashboards and windshields. What these devices promise, like the opening of the Western frontier, and like the automobile and the open road, is a greater freedom?although the freedom promised by GPS is of a very strange new sort.
According to a study commissioned by the hotel chain Travelodge, in twenty years we will be having ?virtual sex? with whoever is waiting for us back home. In the old days, the traveler might have seized the opportunity to sleep with someone else; or, more adventurously still, deployed the noble and fading, video-menaced art of phone sex. In the motels of the future, a guest will simply conjure her partner via Travelodge?s ?active skin electronics,? which will be to sex what Gchat is to work: a way of making the dull endurable, a way to forget the fear that, stuck in the wrong office or the wrong relationship, we are wasting our lives.
It?s already in our Gmail calendar: no Travelodge after 2030.
Other Facets of War
The New Yorker reports on the other contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan:
[A]rmed security personnel account for only about sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast majority?more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq?aren?t hired guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, eat at meager chow halls, and host dance parties featuring Nepalese romance ballads and Ugandan church songs. A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law.
From Guernica, an investigation into the use of open burn pits by U.S. forces:
Veterans Administration and private physicians have seen a significant increase in respiratory problems in soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Other physical problems among war veterans include shortness of breath, headaches and coughing up blood. Almost all of these soldiers had exposure to burn pits as well as battlefield smoke and dust storms. It seems unlikely that the thousands of Iraqis and Afghans working on U.S. military bases or living nearby have escaped such debilitating ailments themselves.
