I find it a bit odd that you think the IRS is good to you when it takes your money from you all year, discovers that they took too much, and then gives some back to you without any interest.

Also, I have been a MacBook owner for about 6 months, and I really like it. I hope your new Mac is even bettter than the old one.

Missy,

the IRS was good to us because they gave us back more money than they took! That’s what you get when the stars align and a)they can’t tax the military housing allowance, b)I make squat as a not-yet-PhD’s college teacher, c)we made several improvements to the structure of our home, and d)had a new baby.

My new computer is better, because it’s got more memory! Other than that it’s the same. Except without all the data. Not that I’m complaining.

Michael,
I didn’t realize the IRS could be good, but I guess there’s a first for everything. Hope the Sullivan clan is well.

Dear Missy,

we are well. Hope all is well with you too. It’s good to hear from you! Blessed Ash Wednesday.

Thank President Clinton for that money.

</dig>

Well, it looks like the Monadology software took out my indications that that last comment was humorous. It was (although it’s also likely true).

HB,

what were the indications? And why is it funny? I don’t get it.

It was supposed to be a dig at the perceived political leanings of those who frequent this site, many of whom don’t like ol’ Bill. I put a mock HTML tag at the end indicating that I was done with the dig, which got removed because I don’t actually know enough HTML to tell the software not to do that. Perhaps humorous is too strong a word; good-natured is probably better.

Yeah, one has to have at least some filtering of HTML tags to prevent malicious code from being submitted. The way around that is to use HTML character entities instead of less than / greater than signs. In this case, &lt;/dig&gt;, which creates </dig>.

many of whom don’t like old Bill

Really? I would have thought many around here would fall on the liberal side. Shows what I know.

…which, in some cases, may actually be why they don’t like old Bill.

(As someone who grew up with chronic exposure to British slang, my first reaction to that was “but who does like the Old Bill, really?”)

Is old Bill not a liberal’s liberal? I ask only out of curiosity. I have no opinion, but was raised in a family of Republicans who thought the Clintons were as much on the Wrong Side as you could get. The only criticism of Clinton I’m aware of having heard from liberals is over the don’t ask don’t tell business. Are there others?

Oh my yes, though of course few on the left had any desire to see him impeached. I’m not a serious hater myself. I do think he stuck to a benignly centrist platform at the cost of much-needed reform. I also accept that it’s possible that in the post-94 climate he might have reasonably felt he had no choice. I imagine you’ll start to see a lot of these old wounds opened up over the course of the next year; Senator Rodham Clinton, who was once considered such a dynamic idealist, is now seen by many as being another centrist Clinton sell-out.

Senator Rodham Clinton, who was once considered such a dynamic idealist, is now seen by many as being another centrist Clinton sell-out.

This is funny to me, because I’m used to hearing my family members say similar things, only instead of “dynamic idealist” substitute “left-wing nutjob” or something equivalent. Either way she’s considered a sellout, then, eh? I wonder if these rumors that although she’s the frontrunner she’s “unelectable” have some substance then? It sure would be bizarre if the “anyone but Bush” lot who narrowly failed last time—becoming the “hell no to more Republicans” in the next election—were edged out by a more bilateral “anyone but Hillary” lot.

The relationship between Clinton and the left is… a bit complicated. This is probably a situation where the increasingly vague distinction between liberals and leftists matters. Basically, to draw a few crude stereotypes, Clinton was very popular with the kind of people that listen to NPR and read The New Republic, and very unpopular with the kind of people that listen to Pacifica and read The Nation. If it would interest anyone but me, I can try to put together a list of left-wing criticisms of Clinton.

It would interest me.

Seconded.

Well, this is, what, three weeks overdue now? I’m very sorry for the delay. As often happens with writing about complex things, the more I thought about it, the bigger and more intimidating it seemed, so I kept putting it off. But here goes:

Fundamentally, leftist opposition to Bill Clinton came from three groups. First, what you might call the economic left, from progressives out to socialists, communists, and anarchists. Next, the anti-war movement. And finally, the civil libertarians.

Economic leftist objections to Clinton included his support for free trade abroad, and his fiscal conservatism at home. Clinton was a strong and sincere supporter of NAFTA and GATT, and most economic leftists were very opposed to both agreements. The protests that shut down the WTO conference in Seattle, in 1999, were decidedly (and radically) leftist, and were a major setback for Clinton. Domestically, some saw the health care plan as a terrible compromise that failed to satisfy either side: essentially creating a big government program that would give lots of money to HMOs, without actually making health care more accessible to most people. And of course, even many moderate leftists objected strongly to Welfare Reform, arguing that it abandoned the most vulnerable people in society in exchange for saving a really insignificant amount of tax money.

Anti-war activists, and, more broadly, supporters of a less interventionist foreign policy, objected to Clinton’s support for a large and (more importantly) active military. Many saw the egnd of the cold war as an opportunity to drastically reduce military spending. Clinton, though he did decrease the military budget very slightly at times, still kept it at a level comparable to where it was in the eighties. Interventions like those in Serbia and Somalia were seen as being less about humanitarianism than about preserving U.S. power abroad, and were also thought to demand too much of American soldiers. Also, many pacifists had moral objections to the continued bombing of, and sanctions against, Iraq.

Civil libertarians objected to a whole series of different things: the Communications Decency Act, which placed restrictions on what could be said on the Internet that were ultimately found to be unconstitutional; various restrictions on cryptography which were seen as invading people’s privacy; the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is still a big issue among many people who see it as a terribly imbalanced expansion of copyright; and various anti-crime laws which increased police power and expanded the death penalty. Notably, Clinton was the first to approve extraordinary rendition.

Of course, I also don’t mean to imply that everyone on the left hated Clinton. He was an enormously popular president, and that was particularly true among liberals. But there were a lot of people on the far left, and even a few on the moderate left, who really objected to his policies.

There is also, of course, the fact that Clinton was very strongly identified with the New Democrats and the DLC, groups that advocate winning votes for the Democratic party by moving towards more centrist positions. Since Bush was elected, many Democrats have become disenchanted with this strategy, fearing that it gave them a temporary advantage in the Clinton years at the expense of alienating the party’s base. Because of this, I suspect many people who enthusiastically supported Bill Clinton in the ’90s would be more suspicious of Hillary Clinton now, seeing her as representing a strategy that ceded too much ground to the Republicans. On the other hand, they may also remember it as a strategy that won two presidential elections. It’s hard to say.

I should say that, in the interest of brevity, I’ve probably oversimplified a lot of the positions here (and portrayed the groups involved as being more clear-cut than they really are). I think my analysis of the situation is approximately right, but it is only an approximation. Also, of course, I don’t agree with all the objections to Clinton that I’ve mentioned: my own beliefs are more complicated and often confused. I’ve done my best to give a summary of Who On The Left Hates Clinton And Why, but not to offer arguments for their opinions, nor to present my own.

Thanks for that, Moss. It seems pretty clear to me that both parties are now in the business of moving towards the center while abandoning their base or core or whatever in order to try and seduce the vague senseless majority. As a result no one among those who really care either way(s) can be happy.

I despise the Two Party system, but I’m afraid the One Party system will be worse.

Well now, that’s very interesting to me, Mr Sullivan, because my own intuition about the Republican Party today is that it’s abandoning one base (the libertarian base) in favor of two other bases (the evangelical/moralist base and the plutocratic base) while, on the whole, ignoring the vague senseless majority entirely. Perhaps it’s just that there’s a fundamental belief common amongst those with a given political leaning: “my party’s moving away from my position, but the other party’s moving even further away from it.”

On the whole I don’t believe the “evangelical/moralist” has been at all well served by the Republican Party. The rhetoric is there, but in the last number of years few if any of their goals have been achieved.

Look at the current front-runners for the Presidential Nomination: neither McCain nor Giuliani are moral or social conservatives.

“my party’s moving away from my position, but the other party’s moving even further away from it.”

I don’t have a party, of course, but if it’s true that both parties are moving to the center, then it’s hard to see how this statement could be true for anyone—my party may be moving away from my position, while the other party must be moving toward it, though not nearly far enough. Not that this satisfies anyone: the Republicans certainly seem to have abandoned the small-government mentality, but this doesn’t make the Democrats any happier. They just gripe about how all that money’s being used.

Also: I’m not sure what the “plutocratic” base is. The Repubs. may be serving the super-rich more than anyone else, but the super-rich are certainly not giving them all their votes. The party wins over a lot of middle-class people by appealing to their religious and moral senses rhetorically, again while giving them little to show for it in return, and also by appealing to the sense the same people have that even if they happen not to be super-rich, well, this is America and I could be if I worked hard enough, and I really want to be, and maybe I will be someday. Also by convincing them that their economic schemes will really help everyone more than the Democratic schemes will (about whether this is true I have nothing to say).

So: if by “plutocratic” you mean the rich, I’m not sure. If by “plutocratic” you mean the iron-souled people that worship money, probably so.

One more note: liberal claims that the Republicans ignore the majority entirely just can’t be right, it seems to me, given that the elections are so close. Either a majority or close to it are still voting for them.

That Bush and co ignore the majority in the face of unpopular policies seems like a separate issue.

For what it’s worth, I was saying that I was the one who might be wearing the Beer Goggles of Partisanship, not you. For instance: it strikes me as shocking but not surprising that you feel that the religious right has cause to feel underserved - shocking, because from my political perspective it seems like they should be so deliriously happy with how things are going right now that James Dobson should be doing lines of coke off a stripper’s ass by way of celebration, but not surprising, because I recognize that in reality Mr Dobson et al are staring over the fence at me and thinking “man, those lefty atheist hippy types must be smoking some pretty green grass right now.” (For the record, I’m not really a grass-smoking atheist hippy, but I thought the bad joke was worth it.)

I will also freely admit that I tend to conflate the Bush Administration’s policies with those of the Republican Party. Certainly there are those, like McCain and Giuliani, who are generally considered more centrist and who certainly don’t spend most of their time and rhetoric shoring up the religious base. Still, I think the louder moderate voice in the GOP is a fairly recent development, and a natural reaction to the plummeting approval ratings of Bush (who in many ways typifies the “for God and Mammon” Republican Party I was describing earlier). When Bush was at his height, you saw a lot more members of the Republican leadership who were just as far right as Bush - Tom DeLay, for instance, took it to a science.

Well, I say “far right”, but I hope you realize I use that term very loosely. “Right” and “left” are, at best, vague hand motions in the direction of someone’s political agenda. In reality, of course, we’re all floating around in some vast amorphous multidimensional cloud. If I’m sitting on any given point in the cloud, the positions least like mine will look small and hard to see clearly, as well as closer to each other than they really are, and it will be very hard to tell exactly where in the cloud they are. So when I say “far right”, please keep in mind I’m just sort of pointing to some general area way off in the distance that I can barely even make out myself. We talk about moving to and from the center, as if it’s linear, but that doesn’t really make any sense at all. Who is to the right of the center? My grandmother-equivalent, a devout Seventh Day Adventist nurse who proudly voted for Reagan but is completely opposed to Bush, or Tom DeLay, a born-again Christian who got paid enough money from the Marianas Islands government to ignore some of the most horrific abuses of humanity occurring on American soil?

My point here was more about me than about reality. I am definitely on the left (I’m the one sitting right between Jesus and Stalin) and so my perspective on both sides of the debate is warped. In theory, to the extent that you are in fact a “centrist” (a term that’s also based on the linear model, but less firmly attached to it - even an amorphous blob has a center) your view should also be warped, but in a more balanced way. So I just found it interesting that from your angle you saw the parties converging, whereas I saw them both drifting in the same direction. You may still be wrong, of course - it’s a very big blob, and figuring out where the blobs-within-blobs that are the major political parties are trending takes some very delicate trigonometry - but the laws of perspective are in your favor, so I found your points interesting.

(However, I would mention that the super-rich certainly are one of the major foundations of the GOP, even if there are only a few hundred of them nationwide. The Walton family stands to gain over a billion dollars, I believe, if the estate tax is repealed, while virtually every other American will lose out of the deal. But the Waltons are going to give any politician who they think is on their side a hell of a lot more than five votes - and that’s why so many politicians talk about the estate tax. Not just Republicans, of course, but they’ve certainly been leading the way.)

I don’t know that I can describe myself as centrist any more than right or left. I would rather call myself apolitical, attempting to look at the whole thing with a discerning eye without joining in. My actual personal views would be to the righmost extreme in some cases (down with abortion, contraception, fornication, and sodomy!) and the leftmost extreme in others (the concept of intellectual property is unjust and should be discarded!). About many issues I have no opinion at all. Whether this state of affairs actually qualifies me better to see things more clearly than you I don’t pretend to say.

from my political perspective it seems like they should be so deliriously happy with how things are going right now …

Of course they feel the same way about your side. No or extremely little progress with abortion in decades, despite appointing most of the Supreme Court Justices; marriage going from a bad state to worse, with gay marriage looming ever closer on the horizon; public education entirely on the side of the liberals, with its eradication of traditional values, relativism, elimination of religion entirely; Ten Commandments and Nativity Scenes dissappearing from public spaces, forced out by the sort of people who wage War On Christmas; wide-spread view of the Constitution as a “Living Document” meant to express modern (read: liberal and degenerate) values over conservative ones; judges with this mindset rampant, trying to alter the Pledge of Allegiance and so forth; etc., etc. As far as the religious right is concerned the hippies have essentially won and they’re desperately fighting a rear-guard action hoping to salvage whatever possible. (Side note: do you mean to deny that you’re a hippy, or that you’re an athiest, or that you smoke grass, or all three? Feel free not to answer.)

What I meant about the super-rich was simply that, no matter how much money they give to the Republicans, they themselves are only worth a tiny number of votes. Somehow all that money combined with a lot of rhetoric has to be persuading an awful lot of non-rich people to vote on their side. This may of course be a very bad thing, but to me it seems distinct from plutocracy.

By the way, I wouldn’t be sorry to hear more about the estate tax. I’m mostly ignorant on the subject, but from what I gather from my (Republican) family, I would suffer a great deal from it were my parents to suddenly die with the law in place, and their property’s worth—I don’t know how much, but not above one or two million, that’s for sure, all tied up in mortgages and maintenance and operation of the little family business. I’ve been given to understand that the estate tax would essentially force the dissolution of the business and require the property to be sold off at a huge loss in order to pay it. So my family is certainly not in the super-rich class and yet would stand to gain from the repeal of the tax. How would “virtually every American” lose by it, other than by the loss to the government of the tax money? Or is that what you meant?

From the IRS website:

Q: What is the Estate Tax?

The Estate Tax is a tax on your right to transfer property at your death. It consists of an accounting of everything you own or have certain interests in at the date of death (Refer to Form 706). The fair market value of these items is used, not necessarily what you paid for them or what their values were when you acquired them. The total of all of these items is your “Gross Estate.” The includible property may consist of Cash and Securities, Real Estate, Insurance, Trusts, Annuities, Business interests and other assets.

Once you have accounted for the Gross Estate, certain deductions (and in special circumstances, reductions to value) are allowed in arriving at your “Taxable Estate.” These deductions may include Mortgages and other Debts, Estate Administration expenses, property that passes to Surviving Spouses and Qualified Charities. The value of some operating business interests or farms may be reduced for estates that qualify.

After the net amount is computed, the value of lifetime taxable gifts (beginning with gifts made in 1977) is added to this number and the tax is computed. The tax is then reduced by the available unified credit. Presently, the amount of this credit reduces the computed tax so that only total taxable estates and lifetime gifts that exceed $1,000,000 will actually have to pay tax. In its current form, the estate tax only affects the wealthiest 2% of all Americans.

So, it looks like your family will be fine.

Michael, just FYI, the current estate tax laws are downright bizarre. Estate tax rates have gone down since 2001 and will continue to until 2010, which will be a windfall year for inheritors as there will be no estate tax. Then in 2011 it will go back up to the rate that it was before Bush’s tax cuts. (Fifty percent, I believe.)

The rates apply to amounts above a certain level. Before Bush the exempted amount was the first $700K or so. The exemptions have been increasing along with the dropping rates—right now I think it’s the first $1 million is exempt, but it will be 2 or 3 by 2009.

There are a lot of stories that one hears about the estate tax and its impact on small business-owning families. I think it’s partly true and partly repealist propaganda. People have definitely been forced to sell off family businesses due to estate taxes, but good planning can go a long way. One very straightforward way to offset estate taxes is to get substantial life insurance. The numbers will often work in your favor.

The super-rich, of course, have vastly better lawyers and financial advisors—and hence better ways of offsetting it, like foundations and foreign investments. They typically end up paying lower estate tax rates than the barely rich or whatever you call them.

(I don’t work for Merrill Lynch or anything, there was a long piece on this in Policy Review a while back.)

hb and Jess,

thanks for the info.

“People have definitely been forced to sell off family businesses due to estate taxes, but good planning can go a long way.”

This is why my family hasn’t had problems yet. It went from my great-grandparents to my grandparents, and from them to my parents, before the owners had died. The problem comes if someone dies suddenly. The “fair market value” of the business is much less than what it’s worth to us—for four generations now it’s helped some of my family acheive modest goals and provided cheap places to live for more, but it’s never brought in very much at all in the way of profit. Over the last thirty to forty years it’s been vastly more valuable to us than its paper worth, and would continue to be so for decades still. But I think it might indeed have to be sold off if my parents suddenly died.