Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Competing Performances
To compare great things with small.
— Milton, Paradise Lost
What a coincidence-the activities of two great performers in the very same week! Of course, the activity of one of the performers was, as all of his performances are, fake, whereas the activities of the other performer were completely genuine, although not as all-encompassing as when viewed in movies.
One of the performances took place on January 26, 2018, in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum. It was there that D.J. Trump, known professionally as “President Trump,” distinguished himself by not making a fool of himself or embarrassing the country he came to represent. He reaffirmed that America was great, letting the attendees know that he has been successful in making America “great again,” while saying, in response to a shouted question that “everyone’s great.”
The other performance took place four days earlier in Greenville, South Carolina, at The Trophy Club, where Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as “Stormy Daniels,” staged her own performance. Her performance was the beginning of a tour that was not in furtherance of making America Great Again. It was a tour that was called: “Make America Horny Again.” It was a somewhat different performance from the one given by Mr. Trump, although the performance revealed Ms. Clifford’s attributes that not only caused her and Mr. Trump to become friends, but demonstrated what qualities she possessed that had contributed to her success in the world of adult entertainment. There were a number of similarities in the presence and presentations of the two celebrities in their respective venues.
According to reports, Mr. Trump was the hottest ticket in Davos at an event attended by luminaries from around the world. One viewer said Mr. Trump was very successful in presenting his accomplishments. Another commentator said the speech had a very strong domestic focus. Like Mr. Trump, Ms. Clifford was very successful in presenting her successes to those in attendance at The Trophy Club, and, of course, her presence reminded viewers that her encounters with Mr. Trump had a strong domestic focus, having taken place while his wife was at home caring for their youngest who had been born a few short months before Mr. Trump’s tryst with Ms. Clifford took place.
Unlike Mr. Trump’s performance, Ms. Clifford’s performance was not marked by a crowd of distinguished diplomats and people of great wealth. It had a folksier appeal. According to one description of those attending Ms. Clifford’s performance, the attendees were “large men with small bills.” Attendees at Davos were people who all had large bills. Many of the men in attendance at Ms. Clifford’s performance wanted to have their pictures taken with her, and she gladly acquiesced. She even graciously removed her top and permitted the man standing next to her to “grab her front,” as the New York Times reporter in attendance delicately put it. She permitted other men to nestle their heads between what were described as her basketball-sized breasts. Those wanting to have their pictures taken with Mr. Trump were not afforded the same courtesy, even if they presented him with large bills.
The cost of attending the two events was markedly different. Davos, when the home of the Economic Forum, is a place only the very wealthy can afford to attend. The Trophy Club upped its prices to take advantage of the appearance of Ms. Clifford. The cover charge went from $10 to $20. Although that was a 100% increase over the normal rate, Jay Levy, who owns the Trophy Club said: “I’ve got to take care of my people. I’ll take advantage of the situation, but not my people.”
The performance at the Trophy Club by Ms. Clifford, was somewhat different from the performance given by Mr. Trump in Davos. Although Mr. Trump strolled imperiously among the guests bestowing occasional, but supercilious smiles and gestures on observers, and ending his appearance with a speech attended by a full house, Ms. Clifford’s appearance, while more revealing, was less imperious. It let the world see what it was that had attracted Mr. Trump to her. In addition to her exposures, she also gave two five-minute burlesque shows. Those shows were, of course, shorter than Mr. Trump’s performance, though probably more entertaining since they were real, whereas descriptions of Mr. Trump’s speech said he mixed fact and fiction. There was no fiction (other than perhaps the cause of the oversized breasts) in Ms. Clifford’s performance.
Running for political office is something Mr. Trump did, and something Ms. Clifford considered. A report in the New York Post that described Ms. Clifford’s appearance at The Trophy Club, concluded with the news that Ms. Clifford had considered running for the Senate against Louisiana’s David Vitter. The campaign slogan she considered was quite different from the “Make America Great Again” slogan used by Mr. Trump. Hers was very straightforward: “Stormy Daniels: Screwing people honestly.” Had Mr. Trump thought of it, with one minor modification, that slogan would have worked for him, too. The only change that would have been required was dropping the last word.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Congress and the Tax Collector
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
— A Saying
Here are two idioms that have no applicability to the United States Congress: “Once bitten, twice shy;” “The third time’s a charm.”
It was all brought to mind upon seeing the headline in the New York Times on January 10, 2018, a few short days before Congress decided it was easier to shut down the government than to legislate. The headline announced that the I.R.S. “paid $20 million to collect $6.7 million in Tax Debts.” At first blush the reader assumed this was a story that had somehow crept into the newspaper by mistake and escaped the attention of the articles editor. The reader who thought that could be forgiven for being surprised at seeing the story. That is because that story had appeared in the New York Times and other publications on two earlier occasions.
In 1996 Congress decided that the Internal Revenue Service could be assisted in collecting unpaid taxes by hiring Private Collection Agencies known as PCAs. Their task was to undertake collections from delinquent taxpayers. The program lasted one year before it was terminated. It was terminated because instead of making money for the government by collecting back taxes, it cost the government $17 million. In addition, it was learned that the PCAs had regularly violated the terms of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
Those interested in collecting past due debts might find themselves leery of giving such a failed effort a second chance. Proving that “once bitten, twice shy” does not apply to Congress, however, the program was re-introduced again in 2004 as part of the American Jobs Creation Act. According to projections at the time that Act was passed, and contrary to empirical evidence from less than 10 years earlier, its Congressional supporters said that the PCAs would collect $1.3 billion and receive commissions of $350 million. It was, so the Congress believed, a sure fire winner.
In 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee held hearings to determine how well the program was working. Here is what it learned. It learned that 85 percent of the people contacted by the PCAs did not owe any back taxes. It learned that, whereas it cost the IRS $.07 for every dollar it collected, it cost the PCAs $.24 to collect the same amount. The IRS had an 11 percent success rate whereas the PCAs had a 4 percent success rate. The PCAs did not collect the promised $1.3 billion. They collected $4.5 million. By most measures that would not be considered a success. Nonetheless, the program continued until it was ended in 2009 by President Obama, who looked at the statistics and came to the conclusion that the program was not working as advertised by its proponents in 2004. Ending the program infuriated Senator Chuck Grassley (R. IA) who had always been a strong supporter of the program and believed that notwithstanding its obvious failures, the fact that the collections were handled by the private sector rather than the public sector was reason enough to continue the program. (Senator Grassley also observed that 60 people in his home state of Iowa would lose their jobs as a result of termination of the program.) And that brings us to the present when we learn that “the third time’s a charm” has no applicability to congressional actions.
In December 2015, Congress enacted a law that required the IRS to use PSAs yet again, in order to collect a part of the $138 billion delinquent taxpayers owed the government. On September 26, 2016, the IRS announced that, following the Congressional mandate, it planned “to begin private collection of certain overdue federal tax debts [in 2016] and has selected four contractors.” The program was in effect during 2017. It was not only Congress that thought the idea of private debt collection was a great idea. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, (whose name suggests his ancestors came from the land of Oz) was asked about the program during his confirmation hearing and said: “it seems like a very obvious thing to do.” It may have been obvious. It was not successful. According to the I.R.S.’s taxpayer advocate, in 2017 the I.R.S. received $6.7 million in taxes collected by the PSAs whereas the PSAs received $20 million in commissions. In addition, in some cases, the PSAs received 25% commissions on collections that they had no role in obtaining. As of this writing, there is no suggestion that Congress intends to end this program. Instead, Congress has been cutting the I.R.S’s budget.
When John Koskinen ended his tenure as commissioner of the IRS in early November 2016, he was open in his criticism of how Congress was funding the IRS. Among other things, he observed that the agency has lost 20,000 full time staffers since 2010. It has lot one-third of its compliance officers. (They are the ones who make the recalcitrant tax payer pay and the ones whose tasks are now being be supplemented by the PSAs.) Things are not all bleak for the PSAs, however. If Congress continues to cut the IRS’s budget, as it seems certain to do, and if, as a result, the agency continues to lose compliance officers, its ability to collect delinquent taxes will get even worse than it now is, and if its budget is cut far enough, the PSAs will look good by comparison, thus justifying their continued employment. Go figure
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
The Funeral for Decency
—Marianne Moore, Complete Poems, author’s noteOmissions are not accidents.
The funeral has begun. The casket lies open on the altar of decency and the asterisk rests quietly within, while the officiant prepares to close the coffin and lower it into its grave. The officiant is Donald J. Trump. The asterisk has served us well and protected us from crudeness. Prior to its last gasp, it had been in a perilous state and its requiem had been sung. But hope sprang eternal, and it was hoped it might recover. It did not, and having been relieved of its suffering, will serve us no longer. Its final illness began many months ago when Donald J. Trump came onto the stage. It was he, with his grossness and contempt for civilized discourse, that caused the asterisk to begin its decline.
The asterisk had for years enjoyed its role of permitting those committing thoughts to writing, to make reference to words that might offend, by only hinting at their use rather than printing them in full. One of the early manifestations of the illness to which the asterisk was succumbing, appeared on October 8, 2016, on the front page of the New York Times. The lead article was entitled: “Tape Reveals Trump Boast About Groping Women.” In the second paragraph of that story, a story having nothing to do with dogs or cats, the words “bitch” and “pussy” appeared, and in the third paragraph, what was formerly referred to as “the F word,” appeared without the help of the asterisk, the paper apparently having concluded that it was no longer needed. The editor who made that decision was confirmed in his belief that the asterisk was no longer an essential part of the literary world when one week later, in columns by noted columnists, Maureen Dowd and Nicholas Kristof, each of them eschewed the asterisk when referring to the fact that the crudity who had become the president of the United States, had agreed with the interviewer, Michael Stern, that his daughter, Ivanka, was a “piece of ***.” Unlike this writer, the two columnists declined the assistance of the asterisk in their pieces.
During the same period that the asterisk’s illness manifested itself in the New York Times, its affliction was also apparent in the Washington Post. On October 10, 2016, there was a story in “The Fix” about comments made by a Clinton aide. In the headline, the asterisk was alive and well. The headline was: “Clinton aide to Donald Trump ‘go * * * * yourself.’” Unquestionably proud of itself and its prominence on the front page of the Washington Post, the asterisk had to be disappointed when in the context of the article it found itself pushed aside in favor of the offending letters that were permitted to complete the word, a word that the asterisk knew even a few months earlier would never have been given voice in a publication as important as The Washington Post. Be that as it may. The debasement of the English language by the White House Fool, is now complete.
In demonstrating his complete lack of qualification to represent the United States in any respect, the White House Fool used a word to describe nations he holds in contempt that, to the knowledge of this writer, had not appeared in the mainstream press or been heard or seen on major radio or television outlets. And it was interesting to see how the transmogrification of the English language and the death of the asterisk was assured during the two or three days following the revelation from Senator Richard Durban of what crudeness had been spoken by the White House Fool on January 11, 2018, when meeting with the Senators. When the report was first made public, at least one major network in describing the word used by the Fool, said it was not a word that journalistic niceties would permit to be uttered and simply hinted at it. The same approach was taken by various other commentators. Such niceties were soon cast aside. Within a matter of 48 hours or so, the asterisk, that had protected the sensibilities of the reader when the story was first reported in print, was discarded, and the offensive word appeared in full in all its glory surrounded for a few days by quotation marks that were apparently considered by the publisher to be a substitute for the deceased asterisk. In a recent column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times the quotation marks have gone the way of the asterisk. The word appears without even a suggestion that its advent into the main stream press is unusual or unwelcome. Like the printed press, radio and television now make no attempt to shield viewers and listeners from the offending word.
Those wanting a longer description of the travels of that word through the media since its advent a few short days ago, should go to a piece written by Sean O’Neil. In his column he traces the word’s treatment since it was introduced into polite society and provides an excellent description of how discretion and sensitivity have left our world. In their place, the White House Fool occupies a bigger and bigger part of it. Sad.