Getting to the Top Line

The dirty secrets bag of tax reform is finally being opened for just a little peek inside, and one of the major taboo subjects is slipping out.  The now discussable (though possibly not yet actionable) secret of just what is included or not included in that little line marked “Adjusted Gross Income” is being revealed in a variety of ways.  A lot of blather is going on about general tax rates and deductions, but those things mostly affect only what is entered on that “AGI” line.  The very rich do not need many tax deductions and general tax rates to them are almost a matter of indifference, because much of their income does not make it to that AGI line in the first place.  Millions of dollars of income, often the majority for the wealthy, disappears without ever making it there.  I first was sensitized to that about 50 years ago, when I learned the esoteric trivium that tax differed on turpentine producers depending on whether the tree from which pine resin was drawn was alive or dead.  There was an exclusion from taxable income for one or the other (I forget which) because it affected the personal income of Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, the author of that particular piece of legislation.  That of course was not even the toe nail of the camel in the tent.

Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, Economic Adviser, Harvard President, etc., rats on his fellow wealthy elites by listing in a recent Washington Post column some of the more conspicuous secrets of hiding income available to the very wealthy.  For example, valuation practices in the tax code make investment partners able to end up with over $50 million in untaxed IRA’s, limited for the rest of us to a $5,000 annual contribution.  Only 1 billion in tax dollars is raised from the 1.2 trillion passed through inheritance and gift each year, a less than 1 percent rate.  “Like kind exchanges” (which are really sales of large  properties) by real estate investment operators are excluded from capital gains taxes,  this after the investors have already received depreciation allowances for appreciated property values unavailable to most home owners.  And wealthy investors and companies can shield most of their income by causing it to appear in low-tax jurisdictions like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Ireland, etc.

Ray Madoff of the Boston College Law School points out that much of the income of the wealthy is not even required to be reported to the IRS, much less taxed. Aside from the inheritances and gifts cited by Summers, Madoff’s list includes payouts from trusts and distributions from life insurance.  It is the kind of exclusions from income listed by Summers and Madoff (and there are many, many more) that make the taxable income of the wealthy so much less than their true gross income that taxing what shows up on the tax form is often only a trivial exercise.

We live in such separate bubbles these days, aware only in minimal ways of the lives of those far up or down the socioeconomic scale from us.  Few of us know what it’s like to live on food stamps, even for a week, or the life that can be led when virtually all income is sheltered not only from taxation, but from any societal responsibility at all.  One of our societal shames is the sense many of the wealthy have that their wealth must remain hidden.  It can only come from a sense of shame, whether admitted or not, that they receive far more from society than they contribute. 

One thing that should unite us is visibility across the tax systems sufficient to know that loads are being borne fairly.  It is part of the glue that holds us together.  That we no longer have.  Summers and Madoff are right in their insistence that true tax reform will require a more open and visible income reporting system.  Any citizen receiving the benefits of our society should be responsible enough not to hide what he or she takes and contributes in relationship to that done by others.  We have lost something worthwhile since the days when Socrates, after receiving an unfair death sentence, refused the opportunity for exile instead, on the grounds that, having accepted the benefits of citizenship, he was obligated to accept its adverse actions as well.  Nothing like a death sentence, only reasonable disclosure and fair taxation is being asked of us today.  The time for dirty secrets should be gone.

George Will and the Christmas Spirit

It’s time again to wish George Will a handsome glass of syllabub and the Christmas Spirit.  Poor George, he needs them so very much!  One detects this, because as the Great Holiday approaches he becomes more and more incoherent in his rages against health reform, unions, the Welfare State, universal suffrage, and all other symbols of unrestricted peace and love.  Bah, humbug, have the poor no poorhouses to go to?  This year his incoherence particularly targets unions and unrestricted voting, hateful reminders of the latent capacity of the poor to upset, through sheer numbers, the blissful profit counting of the rich.  Perhaps he senses the unsettling approach of Marley.

He rails against unions for their “frenzy against freedom”, labeling them grandly as “the enemies of freedom”, and celebrates Michigan’s new “Right to Work” law.  In the interest of his cherished freedom of opinion, he cheers for the decline of the unions (is there some contradiction there, George?), and celebrates the loss of union membership (made possible though the layoffs initiated because of the recession brought on by the excesses of the wealthy.)  Others have already spotted his misuse, in his own frenzy, of Jefferson’s celebrated defense of the right to hold one’s own RELIGIOUS opinion and not support through taxes the RELIGIOUS views of others to argue for the right of non-union workers not to pay union dues. George’s frenzy did not prevent him from careful deletion of the word “religious” from the quote.  Subsequent reprints of that column have also carefully neglected to include the misused quote.  And of course, as a devoted studier of Supreme Court decisions, George should have noted, but did not, the distinction between the unrestricted freedom of opinion and carefully regulated freedom of action.  In right to work laws, the issue under debate is not opinion, but the “free loading” of non-union workers who receive the benefits gained through collective bargaining without paying for them, thereby creating their own little welfare state.  In that perspective, right to work laws are very close to the antithesis of the Jamestown Colony’s “If you don’t work, you don’t eat”.  I’m sure George’s fellow princes of capitalism would welcome the voluntary rejection of higher pay and benefits by such principled workers.

Again in his pre-Christmas frenzy, though, George failed to note the unions’ perhaps greatest attack against freedom. For as Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-laureate economist, notes, it is unions that provide a major counter-force against corporate managers’ freedom to set their own excessive salary increases while simultaneously laying off thousands of workers.  Corporate boards of directors have long ago been made toothless in that regard.  I wonder how poor George overlooked that?

George’s own version of Christmas Spirit exhibits itself in his robust defense of the freedom of those who don’t care enough about overcoming the many barriers to voting to insist on exercising their right to vote.  He asks, compassionately I am sure, “should the indifferent be required to vote?”  He laments that long voting lines are created as the local jurisdictions in places like Alabama and Mississippi tidily try to clean up their voting registers while the untidy poor wait to vote, and fears that eventually voting will be a required exercise for all citizens. Oh, the Horror!  He notes that Hitler was elected with an average voter turnout of 86 percent.  Might it have been preferable for Germans not to be allowed to vote at all?  George regards “lackadaisical citizens choosing not to vote as a non-problem.”  Perhaps he should investigate the suspicious finding of sociologists that voting is itself a means of attaching citizens to the society, and serves to promote social stability.

Ah, the vicissitudes of George’s pre-Christmas doldrums.  All the sweetness and light in the air about us is getting to be too much!  Meanwhile though, we’ll wish him joy and peace, though he may lodge some objections to its too easy availability to all.  Merry Christmas, George!

Assault Weapons and the Second Amendment

I really didn’t want to write about this, but continued silence about last week’s violence in Connecticut could be interpreted as a kind of mute acceptance of the outrage and depravity of the world, and that mustn’t happen.  Some things are obvious.  Assault weapons in the hands of emotionally/mentally disturbed individuals are both a moral outrage and a growing danger to us and our children.  The right of “we the people” peacefully to assemble, whether in shopping malls or elementary schools or churches, and for whatever reason, is being jeopardized by “we, the people.”  A gun rights advocate in Virginia was quoted in the Washington Post this morning as saying about the assault rifle used in the shooting, “Who wouldn’t want a Ferrari?  Shooting it is a blast. It’s fast and accurate.”  Other gun rights advocates are forming long lines at gun stores to load up before they might be prevented from further purchases.  They forget that the mother of the Connecticut shooter was killed by a gun she herself had purchased.  Ralphie, in Christmas Story, was more responsible in his desire for a Red Ryder BB gun than that.

We are sacrificing our children for an absurd interpretation of an 18^th century document.  I dislike joining the blame game, but five old men on the Supreme Court bear as much responsibility for Connecticut as anyone.  The Second Amendment was written at a time, and in both a societal and military framework, vastly different from ours, and our understanding of both ourselves and our societal needs has expanded enormously, points the court majority steadfastly continues to ignore.  At that time, the largest places in America had populations of about 25,000, most people lived in a village or rural setting, and dangers were all around in the form of wild animals and Indian attacks.  The military threat was invasion, on foot and with muskets, by British or French infantry.   Implicit in the Second Amendment rationale is a vision of community we no longer possess.  Madison, the author, recognized the dangers inherent in unrestrained freedom; he even included in its language reference to the needs of “an orderly militia.”  He expressed, in his other writings, the knowledge that left unrestrained, the freedoms expressed in the Constitution could easily lead to corruption and excess.  But he believed that the peer pressure of the small communities in which Americans lived would provide the necessary corrective to such excess.  Even as late as the early 20^th century, that was still a valid belief.  Anyone who has read To Kill A Mockingbird, and sees in it, as I do, a community very like the one in which I grew up, has seen the enormous role for good or ill played by peer pressure in the America That Was.  But we now live in socially fragmented times where high migration, large population centers in which we are all strangers to each other, and moral ambiguity is the norm.  The societal discipline of peer pressure is no more.

The rationale given in the Second Amendment was a military one.  Militias armed with rifles provided by the militiamen themselves were important to protect against the still serious threat of a land invasion from England.  They would look rather silly these days guarding against atom bombs and missile attacks.  One strong virtue the military provides, though, is rules of engagement.  We have learned as our understanding of human psychology expands that the social judgment of young people is not fully formed until their mid-twenties.  And for some, it seems never to form.  Mechanisms for emotional discipline are important.  In hostile situations where emotions run high and weapons are at hand, tightly enforced rules of engagement are a necessary discipline, one obviously lacking in civilian settings where emotions can run equally high.  Easy availability of firearms without either the emotional discipline of peer pressure or of rules of engagement is a recipe for catastrophe, which we are experiencing more and more.

So, what can be done?  A preferred option would be repeal of the Second Amendment.  Its proper time is long past, and democracies around the world do very well without such a safeguard.  That is probably a political impossibility, in which case, the outlawing of civilian purchase, ownership or use of assault weapons should be the minimum acceptable reform.  Simply outlawing ownership, though important, will not by itself be enough.  That outlawing of assault weapons should include criminal liability for gun manufacturers who sell assault weapons to other than military purchasers.  The gun manufacturers are the other culprits, along with the five old men, for the criminally chaotic state into which our society is drifting, and it is they who fund the NRA and other lobbying groups who fight reform.  Reform is no longer a matter of idle discussion.  The tears of our children, and of bereaved parents, demand we find a better way.

Kansas and the EU

When I was a child, the height of the Dust Bowl had been only a decade earlier, and references to it were common. A standard joke was about a farmer praying for rain – not for himself, he had seen it once before, but for his children, who had never seen any. That’s what people did back then, crack jokes about things too difficult to think about otherwise.  So the recent Ken Burns special on PBS about the Dust Bowl days of the 1930’s brought back sobering memories.  Now comes news just this week about how the Midwestern drought has intensified to the point that 100 percent of Kansas, 96 percent of Nebraska, 91 percent of Oklahoma and large portions of other states from South Dakota to Texas are declared to be under “at least” severe drought conditions; 63 percent of the area where winter wheat is grown is considered to be in danger of losing the crop because of drought conditions.  We are speaking here about one of the major breadbaskets of the world, whose crops feed hungry people around the globe. Climate change is beginning to hint at its full potential.  The news is being lost on the back pages of newspapers, and shouldn’t be.

We shouldn’t, this time around, face the devastation of Dust Bowl days.  A lot of the horrors of those days – children unable to go outside in Oklahoma because of the days long dust storms, wide spread pneumonia from dust inhalation, clouds of dust spreading to the east coast, desperate “Okie” migrations to California – were the result of poor farming practices which we’ve learned much better about since.  Some people in the 1930’s wanted the Midwest declared the new American Sahara and forgotten about (remember New Orleans after Katrina?).  FDR refused to accept that, and major federal agricultural research and assistance programs salvaged the Midwest for us and for the entire world.  The farm aid and research programs of today stem from that time.   The Midwest has changed a lot since then, though, with mega-farms and millionaires replacing desperate dirt farmers.  That causes simmering resentment in urban areas against farm subsidy programs, which are increasingly viewed as costly leeching by undeserving giant agricultural corporations.  Which brings me to the EU.

Word is beginning to spread in Washington these days about a possible free trade negotiation starting up between the U.S. and the EU, to create what David Ignatius of the Washington Post calls TAFTA,  a Trans Atlantic Free Trade Area.  According to Ignatius, a major barrier is the U.S. concern about the agricultural support programs of the EU, which provide levels of subsidy and protection to French and other EU farmers undreamt of in this country.  I suspect that any concessions gained by the U.S. on that front would have to be matched by American concessions on agricultural subsidies.  Given the urban resentment in this country, tying reductions in U.S. farm aid to the prospect of enhanced exports to Europe would certainly be an attraction. 

I, an urbanite, resent the raids on the Treasury by the giant agricultural corporations as much as anyone. But I also remember the haunted look in the eyes of small farm relatives in those post-Dust Bowl days.  Climate change is introducing us once again to what could become dangerous times on the farm – times that could pose major threats to our national, and global, food supply.  Multi-million dollar checks to Billion dollar corporations don’t make sense.  We need to trim silly subsidies like the subsidy that pays annual checks to suburban home owners on the gulf coast because the land their house is built on was, many years before, subjected to rice crop damage from hurricanes.  But we need also to be prepared for hard agricultural times – times when the role of the federal government in agriculture looms large. Anyone driving on a back country road can look out and see how technology-intensive farming has become, and it will be more complex as climate issues grow.  For example, increased agricultural irrigation needs to be traded off against depletion of water sources from urbanization and climate change.  We are just as much in danger of losing some of our cities to dwindling water supplies as we are our farms.  Agricultural research, innovative ways to grow and conserve crops, etc., will be just as important as they were in the days of FDR. 

This is one of those areas where, as I’ve mentioned, international policy and domestic policy increasingly unite.  We have to think through carefully how we trade off our domestic agricultural interests against the prospect of enhanced manufacturing exports.  We need to stop thinking that climate change, foreign relations, infrastructure development, green technology, agriculture policy, economic stimulus, etc., are all neat categories which can be analyzed and acted on separately, just as we need to think less of Rust Belts versus Farm Belts.  China watchers like to refer to the 21^st century task of China as a “great rebalancing”, where all the old arrangements need to be rethought and brought into new relationships.  That is our task also.

Building Better Machines

A recent article in Scientific American, entitled “The Wisdom of Psychopaths”, comments how similar many of our society’s leaders – politicians, movie stars, major entrepreneurs – are to what is known as “classic psychopaths.”  They are ruthless, uncaring of consequences to others, superficially charming, overwhelmed by their own self worth, driven to satisfy only their own desires and needs.  And we are busy building more of them all the time.  Sometimes we do it by the way we raise our children, sometimes by the entertainment we prefer, sometimes by how we vote on Election Day, sometimes by the values we elevate through our ideologies.  For example, Michael Sandel, in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, reports that Larry Summers, then President of Harvard, spoke in Harvard Chapel about how Economics enables us to “economize on altruism.”  But sometimes, we just leave it to our engineers.

Case 1: many of us are not aware that when gas prices skyrocket or the charges for our heating in winter become outrageous, they are not the product of some malevolent decision by an evil plotter out to do us harm, but simply the calculation of a computer program, possibly thousands of miles away. Knowing only formulas that define relationships between a change in price of gas or electricity and the resulting change in demand, and uncaring about the possibilities of leaving people stranded or freezing, the program sets prices or selects energy sources to maximize profit for the corporation involved.  The program is effectively autonomous in its decisions, and not at all altruistic.

Case 2: General Electric and other major companies are proudly announcing their achievements in industrial robotics, which is maturing as a way to provide “on-demand” production of consumer goods to exact customer specifications.  The results are great: soon you’ll be spelling out exactly what your dream toaster will be, and it will be arriving on your doorstep the next day.  Of course other consequences will occur.  Millions may be out of work as they are replaced by robots, but hey, that’s capitalism, and for every winner there are multiple losers.  The robots won’t care.

Case 3: the current controversy over the use of “killer drones” for attacking specific terrorists is tempered by the knowledge that a human operator is “in the loop”, actually issuing the decision to strike.  But that’s not really efficient, so engineers are busily working on ways to enable the drone to perform autonomously, thereby opening up a whole new category of homicide: “oops, computer error.”

Case 4: the visionaries of the internet are looking forward to 2045, the year they estimate that all-wise intelligent machines will take over the nasty job of making all the decisions that run the world. The near-term project in that pursuit is to develop computers capable of designing new computers smarter and faster than they are; then the new computer will design its successor, etc., etc.  You may have seen one step in that direction recently on Jeopardy when a computer developed by IBM trounced the greatest human Jeopardy champions.  But will the machines making the decisions for us have really human values and emotional intelligence?

Another article in that same Scientific American noted that a three pound human brain contains the complex circuitry and computational capacity equivalent to the entire internet, so I’m not holding my breath for that 2045 dawn of a new age.  We’ll still outnumber the machines about 10 billion to one.  But that visionary goal illuminates a challenge we face in the near and far future: how to control the burgeoning technology we are so rapidly creating to assure its “built-in” values are truly human, not just the residues of defunct 19^th century philosophies, and that we ourselves stay human, too.   For example, Economic Determinism and Laissez-faire Capitalism, with their emphasis on “economizing altruism” are an example of thinking based on early understandings of Darwinian evolution and the human genome that are now being outgrown; we don’t want them embedded into our machines, and need also to get them out of our heads.  More generally, we have not yet faced up to the task of building ethical machines or an ethical technology-dominant society.

Isaac Asimov solved the problem neatly with his conception of the three laws of robotics; that was great for fiction, but real-life solutions are going to be a lot harder to arrive at.  It was interesting, though, that his first law was equivalent to an age-old truth – the first line of the Hippocratic Oath, “First, strive to do no harm.”  A step forward some engineers might love the challenge of might be to view such ethical principles as “constraints” built into a linear programming algorithm seeking profit maximization.  Who knows? It might actually achieve something.  That would still not solve the altruism issue; that’s Asimov’s second law.  But it’s a step in the right direction. And many such steps are required before we can unleash autonomous machines on our society.

Of course, the fundamental problem we face is not simply building better machines.  It’s building better people.  We really need to outgrow the stage of human society where an objective observer can point out that our leaders are generally psychopaths.  And that will be the hardest job of all.

China and America in the 21st Century

I first became aware of the imminent (then) demise of the Soviet Union back in the early 1980’s from an article in The Wilson Quarterly.  The article noted the rapid emergence of a new educated middle class in Russia, and commented that, “You can threaten a peasant with a gun; it’s much harder to frighten a nuclear engineer.”  Putting that together with the lessons of social history and of my own experience analyzing the changes in supervisory styles occasioned in the U.S. with the emergence of employees more knowledgeable about current technology than their managers, it was easy to see that some major upheavals were on their way in the USSR.  When Reagan made his famous challenge, to “tear down that wall”, the real foundations of that wall had mostly already been eaten away.  I feel somewhat the same now about China. 

China is riding a major housing bubble, and lives off dominance in exports, both enabled by a rapidly growing middle class.  It is a gift to them, but a dangerous one that breeds social revolution.  Increasing inequality as the power brokers of the Communist Party become far richer than those around them nettles the newly affluent middle class.  A highly testing dominated traditional educational system robs the new entrepreneurs of what they perceive as necessary training of their children for global competition.  Trash and polluted air accompanying China’s “industrial revolution”, not important twenty years ago, are now becoming a major public offense.  Revolutions are often thought of the end result of extreme poverty, but far more common is the “revolution of rising expectations”, which can take a variety of forms.  It was prosperous American merchants and land owners who set off the American Revolution, not desperate peasants.  China’s is currently taking the form of growing public resentment against the perceived “corruption” of Communist Party leaders.  A recent analysis by Washington Post reporter Jia Lynn Yang compared this growing resentment of the Chinese middle class to the Tea Party and Occupy movements in the U.S., but more stratified cultures, such as China’s, often see “rising expectations” revolutions take more violent forms, such as that of the American or French Revolutions.

Americans tended to view the 20^th century as the century for struggle for super power status between the U.S. and Russia.  That was really first predicted by De Tocqueville back in the 1840’s, based on his recognition of the characteristics the two countries had in common.  He was not blinded by the then feudalism of Russia versus the raucous democracy of America to all the nations had in common. 

Now Americans view China as a somewhat mysterious rising power from the East on a collision course with the U.S. for dominance as a global super power.  China-U.S. relations are perceived as perhaps the largest international policy issue of the 21^st century, aside from global climate change.  But what is notable also about China’s issues, starting with a polyglot culture spanning a continent, is that they are very much the same as America’s. The rising levels of inequality in both China and in the U.S. are among the greatest, measured on standard international indices, in the world.  Both countries’ educational systems are characterized by areas of brilliant achievement combined with wide-spread trouble spots.  Environment and the need for clean technology are sore spots in both nations.  How to deal with issues of migrant labor occupies both countries.  Constructing an infrastructure capable of supporting a 21^st century economy is an overwhelming need in both.  And other nations rich in people and unexploited resources are nipping at the heels of both, from India and Brazil to South Africa.

Looking longer term, the international super power of the 21^st century will likely be the nation which best addresses its domestic issues.  Both China and America are shaky on doing that in many ways.  China’s problems are its own, and mostly must be dealt with just by China, as they best learn how.  But it is well for us here in America to remember that in a global world “foreign policy” and “domestic policy” are no longer separable.  What we do in dealing with our own infrastructure and education and inequality will determine our standing throughout the world, and our failures will resound worldwide.

Bad-Faith Statistics

I’m just back from a pleasant week away, and was planning on saying something about the EU debt crisis, but it’s still ripening on the vine – or in this case, more a fuse than a vine.  In my assessment, that fuse will sputter on until 2014, when all the moral, political and fiscal bills will come due, so I’ll have probably lots more to say before then.  Meanwhile, some of the statistics being tossed about by columnists like Robert Samuelson on the Washington “Fiscal Cliff” topic are so egregiously bad-faith that I have to tut-tut about them immediately.  By bad-faith, I mean statistics that are deliberately misused by someone who should know better to present a picture opposite to what they actually portray.  And Samuelson, an economist, should know better.  He’s not by himself, by any means, and not all the misrepresenters are conservatives.  But his blatancy stands out.

First, he portrays himself as presenting an even-handed analysis of the role of Social Security.  Maintaining that benefits should be cut, he presents the arguments against doing so as “shortsighted”.  He notes that a principal argument is that most of the elderly are poor, presenting statistics that, to the contrary in his view, 25.9 percent have family income over $75,000, 19.4 percent have income from $50,000 to $74,999, and 18.8 percent have income from $35,000 to$49,999.  He “forgets” to note that adds up to 64.1 percent, meaning 35.9 percent have family incomes below $35,000 and 54.7 percent of the elderly have family income below $50,000.  The median family income in the U.S. is about $52,000 and the family poverty level is about $20,000.  So over half the elderly live with incomes below the national median income, and the majority of those are more than halfway down to the poverty level. That of course argues directly the opposite of Samuelson’s view.  The elderly are not in general affluent.  It should be noted, by the way, that until Social Security began paying benefits 60 years ago, over half the elderly lived below the poverty line, so there has been substantial improvement.  And that benefits the whole nation, something Samuelson seems also to “forget.”

Samuelson then argues that Social Security benefits are not truly “earned” because payroll taxes are used to pay benefits to others, not the worker who paid the taxes.  But Social Security is a form of casualty insurance, which, like all insurance, uses current premium payments to pay benefits to those who have had losses, in this case the loss of income from retirement. Samuelson’s argument is like saying that insurance benefits, after years of paying premiums, are not really “earned” and should be cuttable at will by insurance companies.  I doubt he would regard his own insurance that way.

The Social Security issues arise in the first place because we, as a society, have not come to terms with how we should treat the elderly.  Are they only discards from the labor pool, no longer productive but still, regrettably a “cost of doing business”, or are they honorable fellow members who have done their duty over many years in many ways and deserve a full place at the table?  In the latter view, the economic statistics would show the elderly as having essentially the same median income and poverty rate as the population in general.  The fundamental sticking point is that we continue to deal with the problems and issues of the elderly as only employment related, when they are beyond the time of inclusion in individual employers’ labor pools.  Social Security and Medicare are regarded by employers essentially as unfortunate externalities, which because benefits come after the employment period, only weigh employers down without benefitting them.  But the elderly contribute, and have long contributed, to society in many ways, not just through employment.

We need, as other nations already have, to look at decoupling Medicare and Social Security from individual employment – to regard retirement and health provision as obligations of the whole society.  Though it has immense dangers of its own, perhaps we should consider funding Social Security and Medicare from the General Fund via an income tax or VAT.

We have to deal with the Fiscal Cliff without sacrificing the elderly poor among us.  We all shall be elderly (more and more so according to the demographers), and some shall always be in need. But we are more than just a “cost of doing business.”  Shakespeare put in Cardinal Wolsey’s mouth the lament, “If I had served my God as I have served my king, he would not, in my old age, have left me naked to mine enemies.” We as a society are better than that, but we threaten to behave just as callously whenever the subject of taxes is raised. By coming to terms with the real social value of our elderly, perhaps we could reach societal statistics we can cite without shame.