George Will, Barack Obama, and Socrates

I was recently forwarded an article that George Will wrote about Mr. Obama's statements, trying to use a Socratic method to trap him in his own claims. Unfortunately, Newsweek isn't making this article public, and I probably can't legally attach it to this blog. So I'll have to summarize Mr. Will's point about Mr. Obama's point and then respond. Sorry for the lack of context, maybe I can link to the article later if it becomes available.

Heart and Judging

Mr. Will quotes Mr. Obama as saying "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old."

Mr. Will responds: Should a judge side with whichever party in a controversy stirs his or her empathy? ... Should other factors-- say, the language of the constitutional or statutory provision at issue-- matter?

Mr. Will isn't directly saying that Mr. Obama thinks judges should judge "by heart," but he's making that implication. I think Mr. Obama would say that empathy is important, that it is not the only important issue. This argument from Mr. Will is less the Socratic Method than Strawman Method.

Insurance company profits

Mr. Obama: "The insurance companies, the drug companies, they're not going to give up their profits easily when it comes to health care."

Mr. Will: "Why should they? Who will profit from making those industries unprofitable?"

Me: Mr. Obama's statement implies, to my mind, the giving up of some of their profits. Mr. Will seems to be creating a strawman once again, painting Mr. Obama as saying they should "become unprofitable" which is to say, have no profit. That's not how I interpret Mr. Obama's statement, perhaps some context would help. Back to Mr. Will's question: Why? The reason for less profit (not no profit) is, simply enough, that the US Health Care system is in bad shape. Insurance costs are too high. People are too unhealthy. Far too many are uninsured. Something has to happen, which, in my opinion (I'm safe since I'm not running for office), will probably take taxation, government insurance, reduced profit for insurance and drug companies, and people choosing to live in more healthy lifestyles. If I were in the US at my current job, I'd have to shell out $400-$700 per month for my family, and perhaps be responsible for the first $400 of my costs per year. Canadian system: $100 per month (whole family) and no copays. Who should benefit? All Americans.

Exxon profit

Mr. Obama: [Exxon's profit of $40,600,000,000 annoys me.]

Mr. Will: Do you know that its profit, relative to its revenue, was smaller than Microsoft's and many other corporations'? [emphasis mine]

Me: 40.6 billion just looks a lot smaller than 40,600,000,000. It's an enormous amount or anything, including dollars profit. Mr. Will seems more comfortable in comparing it to Exxon's revenue, their gross receipts. Well, by that logic Exxon's profit is probably less (relative to revenue) than my high-school job when I had my own business mowing lawns-- 85% of my revenue was profit. What is Mr. Will's point? They have a smaller margin than some? Nifty. This is a cheap economists trick which doesn't fool me. I think Mr. Obama's point is that for an industry that basically writes federal energy policy (or if they don't Dick Cheney won't let us know who does) and says it requires large tax breaks to operate, it's astonishingly profitable.

Mr. Will: And that reducing ExxonMobil's profits will injure people who participate in mutual funds, index funds and pension funds that own 52% of the company?

Me: Mr. Will continues to be slippery. He doesn't come out and say "I like Exxon and they should do whatever they want, because I am a shareholder and they're making me more wealthy," but this seems to be his implication. He is right, that if Exxon's profits tumble, the market and lots of investors (normal people, mostly) will be "injured" to use his word, or will lose money. But this "injury" could well be justifiable, which is likely what Mr. Obama would say, especially if it meant an America less dependent on oil, an America pouring less of its money into cars, an America contributing less to climate change, an America with more livable cities, towns, suburbs, and rural areas with more smaller shops closer to homes with more jobs for more people, and less time spent in commuting.


Me: It's easy for me to say I'd support less profit for Health Insurance Companies or Oil Companies, because I don't work for them. I admit that it would be a lot harder if it were my job that would be lost if things were to change. But for the good of the entire country, we are all going to have to make sacrifices if things are to improve with respect to our health and oil. I doubt I will relish the sacrifices I have to make, but the alternative is to pass worse consequences to ourselves later and to our children. And I feel that the well-off (of which I am a part) should bear more of the burden than the less-well-off. If we don't work to make that happen, the poor will bear the brunt of it, as they always do. When Creation is harmed, it is the poor who suffer first and hardest. When the economy is wrecked by people who are raking in huge sums while passing along significant costs to everyone ("externalities") (and there are plenty of worse offenders than Exxon, housing speculators and even worse grain speculators come to mind), it is the poor who suffer first and hardest. There is a difference between my word "suffer" and Mr. Will's word "injury."

Increase not the tax on the ~$150K police officer and teacher

Mr. Will: You [Mr. Obama] favor eliminating the cap on earnings subject to the 12.4 percent Social Security tax, which now covers only the first $102,000. A Chicago police officer married to a Chicago public-school teacher, each with 20 years on the job, have a household income of $147,501, so you would take another $5,642 from them. Are they undertaxed? Are they rich?

Me: I have often wondered percent of American's make how much money. After Googling for a while, it's still not too clear to me. The information on a census page for 2006 showed stats up to $100,000 per household, but stopped after that. A surprising 19% of households made over $100,000 in 2006. But Mr. Will's surprising example would fall still well over that line. Extrapolating from the data on the census site, it seems that this couple makes more than 94% of American households. In my mind, that puts them in the higher tax brackets. This is hardly a "middle class" family, though Mr. Will doesn't claim that they are, but he seems to allude to it through their job titles.

Me, still: Are they undertaxed? They probably don't feel that way. Mr. Will doesn't seem to. But Social Security faces huge problems in shortfalls, and this would be one small way of trying to bridge that gap, rather than just ignore it.

Me, still (hey, it's my blog): Are they rich? Absolutely. Or they have the opportunity to be rich--they might give away 95% their (post-tax) money to charity or they might gamble it all away, so like the fool be soon parted from it. But compared to what people throughout the country have, they are rich. The world: really really rich. I don't know what Mr. Obama would say, probably something different since he's running for office.

The Diplomatic Hammer

Mr. Will: You denounce President Bush for arrogance toward other nations. Yet you vow to use a metaphorical "hammer" to force revisions of trade agreements unless certain weaker nations adjust their labor, environmental and other domestic policies to suit you. Can you define cognitive dissonance?

Me: This is an excellent point by Mr. Will. Mr. Obama's position seems positive from the left side of the political spectrum because it is using US power to leverage some good for the laborers and poor of other countries, who are abused in sweatshops and come into contact with all sorts of pollution to keep me supplied with cheap electronic gadgets that I think are cool, cheap clothes that I too often fail to find time and energy to mend, and cheap natural resources so I can fly for cheap. But it's true that "hammering" other nations is arrogant, unpleasant, and likely to be abused, whether that's to make things look a bit rosier for the US in the Middle East or trying to protect foreign workers and make their companies operate on more of the same rules that "our companies" should be operating under. (Does "our companies" mean anything anymore? I mean companies that operate/employ in the US, but so many are global.)

Mammon

Mr. Will: You want "to reduce money in politics." In February and March, you raised $95 million. See prior question.

Me: This is also an excellent point. Mr. Will certainly saved the best for last. Mr. Obama would probably argue that in order to change the influence of money in politics, one must first be elected. He would also likely argue that he is funded by a large number of smaller donors (his website currently tells of 1,484,322 people who have contributed money, impressive, but still less than 0.5% of Americans). I would love to see him do the amazingly crazy: give away that money to organizations that are doing the things he advocates and stop throwing it all away on TV ads and phone calling stuff that doesn't really change minds anyway. From now on, he and his supporters could just speak their minds to their networks of friends and do interviews with bloggers and the others in the media. It's be a huge publicity stunt, too.

More reflection

Getting away from those two, I think that my e-mailing friend had a really good point that it's interesting that nothing was said in Mr. Will's article about Iraq. We have a political system that creates these inane situations. After months of campaigning in a changing climate of voter opinion and opponents, talking all the time, who wouldn't be liable to being accused of cognitive dissonance? Only the very wealthy, extremely ambitious, well-connected, unbelievably fortunate ever get a shot at being president. Mr. Obama is all of these things, though perhaps less so than others. And his being the likely Democratic nominee is really quite a feat. But where are the reluctant, capable leaders, the King Davids? But even that didn't turn out so well, as power does corrupt. That's one of the reasons I hate seeing so much power consolidated onto this one office as we have seen under Bush-- who can resist being changed by it? And I don't mean changes like they mean it here.

Like most of our really entrenched, difficult problems, I don't think that there is a silver bullet to this. It's not Mr. Obama, of that I'm sure. Though it's also not Mr. McCain or Ms. Clinton. And it certainly wasn't Mr. Bush, though he made similar promises as Mr. Obama does, getting away from Washington status quo and being a "uniter and not a divider."

I think finding a way to break the two party system would be helpful to our politics. I heard of a system (New Zealand, I think), where representatives are allocated based on who wins each zone, but then there are also representatives who are at-large for the entire country, and these are elected proportionally on total votes, with a minimum cut-off of 10 or 15% I think. Example: Party A and B win all the zones, A with 55 seats and B with 45. Party A gets 45% of the vote, party B 30%, party C 20%, and other parties total 5%. In their system, a remaining set of seats (say 50) is allocated to Party A (23 seats), B (16 seats), and C (11 seats). That sounded interesting, as it would give more of a voice to alternative parties. But it wouldn't be THE solution.