What the Duck Dynasty Mess Shows about politics

Liberals suck at tactics. Conservatives suck at strategy.

Let's be honest here. It was no shock that a Conservative Evangelical Christian thinks gay people are Evil Sinners Going to Hell, and that their private sexual activities are the start of the Slippery Slope to Damnation for Us All. That's a big part of the definition of Conservative Evangelical Christian. If you attack a Conservative Evangelical for doing shit like comparing homosexuality to bestiality you will end up fighting the entire international Conservative Evangelical movement.

On the other hand in America in 2013 KKK propaganda is condemned by all right-thinking people, including people like Bobby Jindall. During the 60s the core of KKK propaganda was that all the black people who actually lived in the South liked Jim Crow. It was Yankee and Communist agitators that were causing the Civil Rights movement. Robertson is racist. And not just in the sense that racial equality advocates say everyone is racist. He's racist in the sense that he has just said, flat-out, that blacks were better off when when it was illegal for them to go to the same schools as whites. There is no large international movement to protect people like that.

Which means that if you actually want to get the homophobe off the air the tactic that will work is to emphasize that both sets of comments are equally horrible. Anyone whose headline includes the phrase "Homophobic," or "gay," but not the word racist should be getting a very nasty letter of complaint from your organization.

But while the right won tactically by convincing people who only read headlines that Robertson had not said anything bad about blacks, they really fucked up their strategy.

In the long-term they need non-white votes. A significant proportion of those votes will have to come from blacks. Blacks tend to be skeptical off economic conservatism at a genetic level, because in the black experience freedom (aka: the Emancipation proclamation) = extreme Federal spending (aka: the Civil War) + abrogating the Constitutional rights of wealthy Americans (prior to the war slave-owners were the richest Americans). Even in non-economic realms blacks tend to be suspicious of limitations on Federal power, because in the black experience limited Federal government is generally the justification for not punishing a white guy for limiting black freedom. The Trayvon Martin case is the most recent prominent example.

What could do it is Social Conservatism. Bush tried this, and was getting some traction with it. The problem is that even socially conservative blacks tend to suspect that their socially conservative white peers are only claiming to be reformed on racial issues. It's not hyperbole to say that they have nightmares about a socially conservative Federal Government allowing states to re-impose Jim Crow. And now a social conservative is saying flat-out that blacks were better off under Jim Crow, and a bevy of prominent social conservatives (including non-white Jindall) are defending him.

In some ways this isn't a big deal. If the GOP can double-down on the white vote and nominate somebody Latino-friendly in 2016 they don't actually need to gain ground with blacks. But their recent policy-choices seem to be designed to alienate Latinos, and if their entire strategy is to get an ever-increasing share of an ever-decreasing proportion of the country they've got a huge problem. Politics is a game of flexibility, and the GOP/Conservative movement is extremely unwilling to be flexible.

Rand Paul's Ideas for Detroit

They won't work, but it's nice somebody is taking the problem seriously. Everyone's attitude is basically "Isn't it horrible that we can't do anything," when in fact it would be fairly trivial for any level of government above Detroit (including the County) to solve. They just don't want to spend money. Paul's idea would spend a large amount of money, by basically abolishing taxes in poor areas like Detroit, but it's nice that he's trying.

Granted he's trying to get Obama to sign a huge tax cut for free, but at least he's doing Detroit the courtesy of using us for political cover for his pre-existing anti-tax position. Everyone else is treating the City like it's got zombie-plague.

The problem with previous ones is Detroit's taxes are only high in comparison to the tiny little cities that dominate the rest of Michigan. In Cleveland today I pay more taxes then I did in Detroit. Sales taxes is almost three points higher, I pay income tax to two cities on every dollar I earn, and both cities charge at least Detroit's 2%, Detroit's property taxes were probably higher but I have never owned a home. This means that local taxes just aren't that big a deterrent from living in Detroit. In fact if the City had doubled the income tax, added a two-cent sales tax; and used the money to get reasonable police/fire response times and a working mass transit system back in the Archer years we could probably have avoided a lot of this mess. But that would have taken leadership, because the state would have had to agree with increased Detroit taxes, and Archer was a manager. In some ways Kwame had a better chance to pull this off because he at least had a Democratic governor (Granholm), but he wasn't interested in long-term planning.

The clearest proof of this was in Kevyn Orr's original "Report to Creditors," which was his attempt to convince the pension0funds and bond-holders to cave prior to filing for bankruptcy. Page 11 detailed the comparative tax burdens and insurance cost premiums of Detroit and several local 'burbs. Detroit's Tax penalty was $300-$600, but Detroiters pay an Auto insurance penalty of $800-$2,000. In other words, even waiving Detroit's taxes completely won't make the City competitive because much of the extra cost of living in Detroit is levied by insurance companies.

Paul's program might work because it also guts Federal taxes. If I can get a huge Federal tax break then that might compensate me for a) paying through the nose for insurance, and b) needing to hire my own private security.

The problem with implementing it on a large scale is that it could work too well. It would apply to a fairly significant proportion of the country (any area where unemployment is 1.5% higher then average), and it would give such massive tax benefits that you could see some pretty huge distortions in the market. For example, if I'm Apple I could move my HQ to a small city with a population of a few thousand, start a "philanthropic" homeless shelter that gives 1,000 people fairly nice apartments for free as long as they remain legally unemployed, and never have to bother with that Double Irish again. The unemployment rate can't drop below 20%, and the rest of the country isn't likely to hit 18.5%. I have saved myself a bucket-load of money.