Monday, October 14, 2013

The Smallness of our Extremism

I'm going to be writing a series of posts that are loosely connected to show, I hope, the subtle ways in which seemingly unrelated events and trends in our society combine in destructive ways. I believe that to truly move forward as a society, we need thinkers, citizens, and leaders who can see this interconnectedness. Any of these posts will be accessible from the following table:

Table of Contents

  1. The Smallness of our Extremism
  2. The Power of the Gatekeepers
  3. Blockbusters and Gatekeepers
  4. On the Importance of Literature and the Humanities
  5. Back to Dunning-Kruger

The Smallness of our Extremism

At the time of this post, the US government is shut down and negotiations are underway to reopen it. Currently, it seems that for shutting down the government and threatening the credit-worthiness of US debts, the Republicans will get a temporary waiver of a tax on medical devices. That's right, millions of lives were disrupted and a great deal of uncertainty was generated in the business world all so that a few companies could get a (temporary) special tax break that essentially amounts to pork spending.

But this is just a single example of how the ridiculously tiny differences between our two political parties are getting blown entirely out of proportion. As many know, the shutdown began in the first place because Republicans want to force the Democrats to not implement a health care plan that is essentially identical to the one their last Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, implemented in Massachusetts when he was governor there. Another example involves tax rates. The top tax bracket on personal income for the entirety of the 1950's was 91%. But now the two parties, Republicans in particular, are acting like it's the end of the free world because the top federal rate is 39.6% instead of 35%. Yes, there's talk of revolution over a less than five percent different in the top income bracket.

It will become apparent if you read this blog, that I don't fit easily within either political party. I generally find them both to be wrong about things more often than they are right, and, up until a few years ago, I found the wrongness fairly evenly divided between them. The range of political policies they represent is ridiculously narrow. Could you imagine someone advocating a 90% tax rate today? Could you imagine someone advocating a 23% tax rate on the top income bracket? By the way, that is the actual average paid by the top 0.1% of earners in 2010 as reported in the ultra-liberal magazine Forbes (/sarcasm). How about we have a national corporate tax level of 0% since, as CBS reports, many Fortune 500 companies already pay 0%?

These would be policies worth fighting over. Not worth shutting down a government and threatening a world economic crisis for, but definitely worth getting mad about. But given the smallness of the differences between the positions of the two current parties, the extremism currently on display is unwarranted, childish, and embarrassing.

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