Ironic Processing

Virginia Postrel from the November 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

His views can nonetheless be translated into a campaign document. You just have to push the metaphor: The "atomized parts" are citizens, or voters, or taxpayers, or just plain individuals. They’re the little pieces that don’t count for much until they’re brought into the grand scheme, connected to the whole. You connect them to those deeper meanings by deciding what goals they should pursue–programming them to solve the right problems.

Follow this analogy, and you wind up with a platform that reads something like Gore’s campaign document, Prosperity for America’s Families. Filled with grandiose promises and constant repetition, this 191-page "plan" consists largely of prescriptions to add more headache-inducing complexity to the tax code, all in the name of rewarding good behavior.

Take retirement savings. Gore wants people to save, but he wants the savings to cost people the same regardless of how much money they make. Today’s IRAs don’t do that. A family making $25,000 pays no income taxes, so putting away $2,000 in retirement savings costs the full two grand. A family that makes $75,000 is in the 28 percent bracket, so sticking $2,000 in a tax-deductible IRA costs just $1,440. That’s not fair, suggests the Gore document.

You could, of course, solve the unfairness problem by flattening tax rates, so that everyone faced the same tax hit. You could even eliminate special treatment of retirement savings and let taxpayers decide, in an unbiased way, how to spend their money. But that even-handed approach would let the atomized parts decide on their own purposes. It would offer no deeper meanings.

Instead, the current progressivity of the tax code becomes an argument for even greater progressivity. Gore proposes a new Retirement Savings Plus program in which people who save but don’t pay taxes will receive matching funds and people who save and do pay taxes will get credits that go down as their tax rate goes up. Having centrally decided that the nation’s little processors should all attack the problem of retirement savings, he has to rig the pieces of the problem assigned to each household.

Saving for retirement is important to Gore, but the true central organizing principle of his plan is that everyone should be raising children and sending them to college. His plan thus offers a tax deduction for college tuition, establishes tax-sheltered accounts to save for educational expenses, and gives a tax credit for after-school programs. It hikes the child-care tax credit (including a credit for parents who stay home with very young kids) and promises full-time moms who haven’t paid Social Security taxes the same benefits as employed women who have. Parents whose kids aren’t either in college or young enough for day care are pretty much out of luck when it comes to tax cuts as, of course, are people who make too much money.

Prosperity for America’s Families goes on and on in this vein. To keep the nation’s "atomized parts" from pursuing their own, unapproved goals, Gore creates so many new specialized categories that he winds up contradicting his own goals. His plan "corrects" the marriage penalty by doubling the standard deduction, for instance, but that penalizes any couple who itemizes to take advantage of any of its other credits–or of the old mortgage deduction.

The overall effect is an irony worthy of any machine-age, old-paradigm manager: In pursuit of deeper meanings and centralized purposes, Gore winds up slicing Americans into ever-narrower interest groups, favoring some and punishing others.