Being outside the bubble makes the world a better place

I don’t think I can accurately convey the immense difference in mind set from working inside the political bubble to now functioning, for the most part, outside of it. The only remaining bond is the fact that I live in DC.

The recent “scandals” are a prime example.

While the economy continues to sputter, Wall Street criminals continue to feed off taxpayers and homeowners, and children struggle to get a meal and get an education, Congress and the media are obsessed with the IRS doing its job, trumped up hearings on a terrorist attack in Libya, and the government investigating the leak of “classified” information to the Associated Press.

Each of these stories has a touch of importance, but you wouldn’t be able to figure that out from the coverage or the political yappers on TV. Each story deserves its own post and a careful examination of the facts.

As for my experience, thank god I’m no longer working on the hill getting caught up in this. It reminds of the experience my sister had while at home with her oldest child. She watched a great deal of TV, it was a companion.  Suddenly the world was a very dangerous and dark place. The news kept telling her about all the murders, kidnappings, and crime in the world. She didn’t want Emily to leave the house, let alone play with her friends outside. Then, as her other children were born and got older, and TV time diminished, the world grew brighter. Instead of listening to the observations of others, and away from the stories told to garner ratings, she was actually living in the world again. And guess what, that world was much safer than what the screen inside was trying to sell her.

Leaving politics is very much the same. All of the arguments now make no sense to me. All the time and energy spent creating fake outrage is that more regrettable. There are still big issues at play, still important differences to discuss and debate. But trust me, almost none of that is taking place. Just ginned up anger to fuel donations and media coverage.

It makes you wonder how much we could be accomplishing instead.

Is the United States no better than Greece?

As author Mark Lewis pointed out in 2010, Greece is in a huge hole in large part part because no one pays taxes.

The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all. The problem wasn’t the law—there was a law on the books that made it a jailable offense to cheat the government out of more than 150,000 euros—but its enforcement. “If the law was enforced,” the tax collector said, “every doctor in Greece would be in jail.” I laughed, and he gave me a stare. “I am completely serious.” One reason no one is ever prosecuted—apart from the fact that prosecution would seem arbitrary, as everyone is doing it—is that the Greek courts take up to 15 years to resolve tax cases. “The one who does not want to pay, and who gets caught, just goes to court,” he says. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the activity in the Greek economy that might be subject to the income tax goes officially unrecorded, he says, compared with an average of about 18 percent in the rest of Europe.

. . .

In Athens, I several times had a feeling new to me as a journalist: a complete lack of interest in what was obviously shocking material. I’d sit down with someone who knew the inner workings of the Greek government: a big-time banker, a tax collector, a deputy finance minister, a former M.P. I’d take out my notepad and start writing down the stories that spilled out of them. Scandal after scandal poured forth. Twenty minutes into it I’d lose interest. There were simply too many: they could fill libraries, never mind a magazine article.

Today comes a story from Forbes about the extremes local and state governments are willing to go to crack down on tax cheats:

All of the taxes in the world don’t mean a thing if you can’t collect on them – or so many states and localities are figuring out these days. Taxing authorities fromTennessee to New Jersey are reporting shortfalls and lags in collections activities just as cuts from federal funding are being felt.

Some taxing authorities are saying enough. Alternative, aggressive and controversial new proposals are popping up all over in an effort to fill budget holes.

. . .

A county in North Carolina is going even further: in Jackson County, North Carolina, if you don’t pay your taxes, you could lose your house. County tax collectors are using the threat of foreclosure to collect outstanding taxes, a tactic the county hadn’t used since the early 1980s. While effective – the county has collected about $1.2 million in payments from 85 individual tax delinquents – that level of aggressive collections is considered so contrary to public policy that even the Internal Revenue Service has been discouraged from the behavior.

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. Greeks haven’t been paying their taxes for decades and their society has begun to break down. I hope Americans have better sense.