The Separation of Congress and Fact

Christine O’Donnell is surfing in the wake of another media storm. This one centered on an exchange between her and her opponent, Chris Coons, regarding the First Amendment and the concept of the Separation of Church and state.

A quick summary of the argument:

O’Donnell made the contention that the “separation of church and state” was
not in the constitution

Coons refuted that by quoting the Establishment Clause in the First
Amendment which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The aftermath:

Mr. Coons (and the majority of those viewing and watching the debate) thought that Coons had won the exchange. The Establishment Clause has long been associated with the concept of the “separation of church and state.” (Several Supreme Court decisions on the topic have referred to it as such—Lemon v. Kurtzman being the most prominent, but there are quite a few others).


However, O’Donnell felt that she had won—as nowhere in the Constitution do the words “Separation of Church and State” exist. Her position made the (unarticulated) argument that the role of the establishment clause is to keep Government out of Religion—but not keep Religion out of Government.

Here we can get lost in a spiraling and ultimately pointless debate.

The staunchly Conservative side will try to scare us into believing that those who interpret the Establishment Clause as dictating that the Government uphold a strict “separation between church and state,” thus disallowing religion from the public arena—and that the end result will be an society steeped in secular amorality.

The extreme Liberal side will try to scare us all into believing that the Conservatives seek to eliminate the separation of church and state for the purpose of building a theocracy.

And thus—in the “debate” the actual content of the argument and the facts of the matter get swallowed up. So, let’s eliminate the phrase “Separation of Church and State” and actually look at the purpose of the Establishment Clause and how the Supreme Court has interpreted it:

The biggest landmark case regarding the interpretation of the Establishment Clause (as I mention above) was Lemon v. Kurtzman. The judgment helped define the bounds of the Clause by providing a 3-part Litmus test for determining if an action violates the First Amendment. The 3 tests are as follows:

1) The government action must have a secular purpose;
2) Its primary purpose must not be to inhibit or to advance religion;
3) There must be no excessive entanglement between government and religion.

Using this test, the Supreme Court has made several important decisions. One of which was banning states from requiring that Creationism be taught in schools (the court determined that it violates all 3!)

Here I have to add that Ms. O’Donnell has, may times, stated that, Constitutionally, the States have the right to determine if religious messages (such as Creationism/Intelligent Design) are taught in public schools. Though she is free to desire this as a matter of personal preference—as a matter of Constitutional Law—she is simply wrong. Senators take a pledge to uphold the constitution—but it is not within their authority to INTERPRET the law. That is a matter for the Supreme Court (and, in this instance, it is one that the Supreme Court settled some 40 years ago).

The Crux:

My issue? Polarization. These debates turn into sideshows that skirt the actual issues. In places, I thought Coons did a good job of trying to push a few key points: the candidate’s willingness to seek bipartisan compromise for one (this is what I see to be the most vital trait of anyone elected to Congress these days). The sad part?—those quotes didn’t get any media buzz.

These debates (and candidates) don’t address the economic realities. Conservatives scream about cutting Government funding, but few will identify any existing programs they would cut (with the exception of the absolutist Libertarians who want to cut EVERYTHING—a position so extreme and void of potential comprise that it is, in effect, useless).

We have Progressives who cite the need for improving Government efficiency and reforming agencies to reduce waste and promote growth—but they aren’t delivering any clear path of specific actions they would take to do it.

Instead, they squabble pointlessly, using polarizing non-issues, such as the “Separation of Church and State” and both sides then create narratives to create boogie/counter-boogie men.

On Self-Reliance and Individual Responsibility

The Conservative Narrative quite often makes the claim that Progressive/Liberal minded folk are moving away from the American/Western ideals of Self Reliance and Individual Responsibility. The claim (I will try to sum it up as cleanly and accurately as possible) is that the Progressive social policies, and thus the underlying moral-ethical forces behind those policies, creates a sense of entitlement that breeds laziness and spreads the basic idea that “someone else will take care of me/this/that/the world.” The contention is that the Progressive philosophy works to divorce man from responsibility and teaches him to wait for someone else to foot the bill.

As we get beyond the semantics of particular issues, we see Conservative statements promoting self-reliance and individual responsibility cropping up more and more often. Progressivism’s lack of these virtues is the root of Progressive social policies, and an epidemic loss of Self-Reliance and Individual Responsibility will be the ultimate result of the implementation of the Progressive Agenda—and will strangle what is left of the gasping American Dream.

Is that a fair enough rephrase of the idea?

First, I want to get into something semantic. The idea of “Self-Reliance” is an old one in America. The term was raised to the height of the American Identity by Emerson in his essay titled ‘Self-Reliance.’ When folks use the phrase, they are calling upon an emotional appeal back to the “good old days” of the American Revolution and Western Frontier. The Conservative Narrative creates a marriage between the concepts of Self-Reliance and economics. It is used as an argument against welfare and entitlement spending (though never against Social Security of Medicare…). In the narrative, American Self-Reliance has become synonymous with self-sufficiency.

However, that is NOT what Emerson’s essay is about. The essay includes lines such as “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” “Insist on yourself; never imitate,” and, one of my personal favorites, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” His essay is not about material subsistence, it is about ideals (material subsistence may well BE one of your ideals, but saying that self-reliance is about subsistence is putting the philosophical cart before the horse).

The other catchword that I mentioned is “Individual Responsibility.” As I conceptualize it, Individual Responsibility addresses the need for people to own and be consistent their principals—though again, the narrative has co-opted the concept of Individual Responsibility to make it an economic concept. However, again, I think that is a misuse and oversimplification of the idea of Individual Responsibility. Individual Responsibility is about principals (whatever they may be)—and individuals being accountable to acting on those beliefs.

If your principals are New Testament Judeo-Christian, you would expect them to live with charity, humility and acceptance of others. I think it’s important to remember that the only time Jesus got angry was when he found the money changers outside the temple and threw over their tables. Ponder that one a second: the only time he ever got angry was when his own people were not living consistently with their own belief system. He was never angry with the pagans or heathens or people who did not share his beliefs. He told his Disciples that if they were not received well in a town to dust off their feet and move on—long gone are the Old Testament days of turning all of the Sodomites into pillars of salt!

Financial issues were always secondary to Jesus. Hell, he made Judas the Treasurer. Think about THAT one a moment—the one who betrayed Jesus was the one who was focusing on the finances rather than the ideals. Here we can have a chicken and the egg debate, was he destined to betray Jesus, did managing the money corrupt him, etc. I don’t know. I just know the surface fact: the man who was always thinking about the money is the one who put profit over principals.

Now—sorry for taking the slow boat back to topicville… but this is why I get so upset when I see the Conservative Narrative questioning/criticizing/disparaging the lack of Self-Reliance and Individual Responsibility of Progressives.

For a Progressive, personal profit is not the driving principal. Many of us belief that profit and prosperity is best achieved as a side effect of a healthy society. That’s why concepts such as affordable education, access to healthcare and intelligent regulation are important tenants to Progressives. Seeds scattered on stony, shallow, scorched or thorny soils do not thrive.

When early Americans met hardships, discrimination and a lack of opportunity they simply moved west and found new soil to cultivate and make their own. Moving west can no longer solve our problems (actually, given CA’s economy, moving west would only make them worse). Western expansionism was fantastically successful.... 100 years ago. Today, we can’t simply find somewhere else to take root. We have to cultivate. That is the core of the Progressive mindset.

The Crux?

We no longer have the room to run a free range economy. The world is becoming a cramped and competitive place. Conservatives often draw upon ideals of the old west—they should keep looking at it and study what happened after western expansion—law was brought to the lawless areas, property was divided, cities were formed and fields were cultivated. Why?—out of necessity so that we could survive and prosper as a society.

Progressives believe that it is our responsibility, as citizens, to shape our society and economy through government. They do not believe in relying on the “Indivisible Hand of the Market” to solve our social and economic problems. Indeed—they tend to be Self-Reliant and believe that it is the citizen’s responsibility to shape society, rather than just wait for some mysterious force to come along and clean up the mess that we and our parents made.

Are you rich?

There is a class war brewing (or is it already erupting?) over the proposed extension/expiration of the bush tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals. I’ve seen dozens of articles, and had a fair share of personal conversations. The most recent was this article, talking about a professor and his doctor wife who are “having trouble making ends meet” while making $400,000/yr.

Now, I am going to avoid the merits of either side of this debate at the moment—the arguments for either side are both interesting and oftentimes flawed—and it’s not a war I have the time to wage.

However, the question I had is why?—Why is this debate taking place? A large number of people making $250,000-$500,000 are rejecting the label of ‘rich,’ and feel as if they are being “vilified” and “punished” by the proposed cancelation of the top-tier Bush tax cuts. (With great restraint I am avoiding the arguments for either side here in this post…) but my question is—who decided that at someone making $250,000-$500,000 was rich?

In previous blog posts, I did quite a bit of research crawling through tax code data from 1920 to the present, and I noticed something—there was some serious fluxuations in the total number of income tax brackets:




Now, from the 1930’s to the mid 1970s, we had over 20 tax brackets. We had a gradient tax structure. There was no threshold where the tax code decided “that guy is rich, let’s tax him more!” If you are going to have a graduated tax structure (AKA non-flat tax) then a gradient tax structure is what makes the most sense for a wide variety of reasons—not the least of which being that a gradient tax structure avoids creating a divisive threshold at which one segment of the population is taxed more or less than another.

So, what happened? Between 1978 and 1987 the total number of tax brackets plummeted from 25 to 5 and continued to sink down to just 3 in 1991. What the hell!?

First, let’s break it down. The first drop from 25 to 16 took place under Carter’s administration, and then in 1986, under Reagan, the tax code was further sliced down from 16 brackets to 5… effectively creating “tax bubbles.”

The “Tax Reform Act of 1986” which caused this, was sold as a “simplification of the tax code” and hailed as the second half off the famed “Reagan Tax Cuts,” which were based firmly in the mythology of Trickle-Down economics.

So what?

Well, here’s the thing, it created a social-bubble where there wasn’t one before. It drew a line between income rates that has created an adversarial relationship between those making over $250,000 and those making under.

Though the Tax Rates call them “top tier earners,” families who are in the $250,000-$500,000 income range self-identify as “middle class” and feel that they are being miss-categorized as “rich” and do not feel as if they should have their taxes increased. They are living the dream of the American Middle Class.

However, there is another truth which our nation is struggling to accept—the Middle Class has proven to be just as mythical as trickle-down economics. Families making $250,000-$500,000 have access all of the things we commonly associated with the middle class: mobility, money for vacations, college funds, a nice house with a picket fence… however, there is nothing “middle” about making $250,000-$500,000.

The Median Household Income in the US (as of the 2010 Census) is around $48,000. Families making around $48,000 today live lives of financial instability. They have stay-cations, college loans, and overdue mortgages. If you look at the how those who live in the median income range in the US, there is nothing “Middle Class” about them.

The Crux:

Okay, I will try to wrangle back to my topic—the division of wealth is a rant for another day. What we face today is a rising conflict in which the $250,000+ income tax bracket has become a flashpoint for the conflict. It has become an-us-versus-them cultural war about who is rich, and who is not. Both sides are being vilified.

The top earners as greedy capitalists who are out of touch with society and the other 95%+ of the country are being portrayed as an entitlement-starved proletariat.

What I want to know, is which is the cause, and which is the effect. Our country was once an economic gradient. From poor to middle to rich, we used to have a society that harbored a degree of mobility—there was a middle-class, and if you worked hard and had a bit of luck, you could obtain that life.

Today that gradient is fading, fast. So fast that those who are in the old “middle class” have yet to notice that the ground has shifted and that they are now the nouveau riche. And the rest of society has yet to realize that the conceptual “American Dream” is quickly becoming a memory.

But one thing I do know—is that Reagan’s tax structure is not, at all, helping the problem. It’s dissolving our social constructs and dissolving the concept of the American Dream—as we now see the things of the “middle class” are reserved for the top-earners—earners who often times, don’t realize how much they actually have.