The Trick of Truth

 Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

 

I remember the first time I swore in a witness.  I was a young, young lawyer, and I was a notary, so I was able to swear folks in.  I was waiting at Judge J. Harper Meredith’s office. He saw me and told me to swear in the people in his office.  He did it to give me a tiny bit of experience, and maybe an anecdote to tell forty-some years later.

 

The whole truth:  That’s a problem with public discourse.  It always has been.  Maybe my impression that it’s sharply on the rise is because we are living in it now.

 

But I don’t think so – It’s worse.

 

Public discourse never contains "the whole truth."    Even when it's true, the whole truth doesn't live there.  To tell any of the good, valid points on the other side detracts from your argument. 

 

And leaves you open for valid criticism of your views because you are not subject to the "What they didn't tell you was . . ."

 

We have lived for 2-1/2 months with voter ID, mail-in ballots, absentee voting and early voting.  Have you ever seen a discussion of any of these issues which presented "the whole truth?"

 

I didn't think so.  So we stumble along, growing louder and louder with our arguments.  We DISCUSS nothing.

 

Let's go over some issues and tell, as much as we can in a little blog post, "the whole truth."

 

THE $15 MINIMUM WAGE:

 

No one can exist with a 40 hours job at the current $7.25 hourly wage.  You cannot feed yourself, have a private place to sleep, clothe yourself and find transportation on $7.25.  It will bring people out of poverty.  It will stimulate the community - People with have more money to spend at the grocery store and the shoe repair shop.  In fact, local Chambers of Commerce say that a dollar of wages will add $7 to the economic activity of the area.  It will loosen the public purse by getting people off public assistance.  $15 an hour will disproportionally affect women minorities positively.

 

These are all pretty good reasons.  They are valid.

 

Oh, I know which readers are getting mad.  Let me make everyone else mad.

 

A problem arguing against $15 is that an argument anti- is much more involved.  Equally valid, but hard-to-follow.

 

Some businesses will lay off workers who currently earn $10 or less an hour.  The businesses will lay off minimal-skilled workers, who are the people $15 an hour is supposed to help.  It will also reduce take-home wages because, at some point, cutting hours, the minimum wage worker will result in less money coming in.  (Minimal-skilled workers are mostly young, women, minorities, and seniors.)  Long-term, lay-offs reduce on-the-job training, which will cut that worker's future wage.  Minimum wage work teaches some skills - use of equipment and cash-registers, and the simple lesson that it pays to get to work on time.  $15 will hit the $16 - 20 an hour particularly hard.  They will work harder and be able to buy less groceries.  $15 will result in higher prices for everyone.  It's PEOPLE who pay for everything.  Groceries are sold at low mark-up.  The owners want to - and are entitled to - make a certain amount.  The $!.99 loaf of bread just went up to $2.09.  It's not makers of luxury goods who will suffer, it's mom & pop business customers.  Walmart customers.  Every customer.

 

Tentative lessons to be drawn:

 

Most minimum wage workers will be better off.  How much is subject to dispute.

 

Minimum wage workers will not be as better-off as much as the Pro-15 people say.  Some workers will be worse off and some workers will be laid off.  How much and how many is subject to dispute.

 

GREEN NEW DEAL:

 

The scientific community has decided that the planet is warming steadily.  We are seeing some effects.  A major player is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and it is raised by burning fossil fuels.  Some people disagree, they are entitled to, and they are wrong.

 

Arguments Pro:  The warm air stimulates hurricanes and odd climate shifts.  Polar ice will melt and the ocean level will be raised significantly.  If the methane currently in solid from far down in the oceans melts, that will add a sudden boost to the greenhouse gases.  Areas of the earth currently livable like the Australian Outback will become unbearable.   There is a point when the climate change becomes unstoppable, but we don't know where that is.  Everybody uses "existential" inappropriately.  With this one, it's used correctly.

 

Proponents make valid arguments.

 

Arguments Anit-:  We cannot suddenly stop burning fossil fuels or the world economy will collapse.  Really.  No kidding.  If we do it partially, the economy as it applies to low wage workers will collapse.  We cannot even successfully quit using fossil fuels unless we are willing to live without steel and nylon and a host of other products drawn from fossil fuels as feedstocks.   We will - we have - suddenly put many workers out of work, and they do not have transferrable skills.  (Transferrable skills are those you learn in one job but you can transfer to other work.  If you are a coal miner and lose your job, you've learned very little which makes you attractive to employers.)

 

It applies to voting.  It applies to guns - Pass Beto O'Rourke's dream bill.  Some people next year will be alive when they would not absent the bill.  And some extra people will be dead.  Both sides have points.

 

Apparently, we are not ready to have fair discussions or anything vaguely resembling unity, other than "believe it my way or else" unity.

 

And you wonder why I term myself a member of the Bull Moose Party.

 

Mizpah!

The 1776 Commission Report

President Trump created a "1776 Commission" whose brief was to look at how we look and teach about America.

Perhaps they are right.  Perhaps they are wrong.

The Biden Administration has suppressed it as an official government document.  (The Administration hasn't burned it or such like.)

Here it is - Right, wrong or in-between.

 1776 Commission Report.pdf

Mizpah!

Was the Presidential election stolen?

 

 According to one poll, 77% of Trump voters believe it was.  Along with 37% of independents and 10% of Democrats. 

The problem is not whether it was “stolen”.  We’ll never know for sure.  The problem is that people BELIEVE that it was stolen.  People act on what they believe, not what is objectively true. 

A better question is, did fraudulent behavior change the results?  EVERY presidential election has had some fraud.   For that matter, EVERY election has had some fraud.  Lyndon Johnson ran for US Senator twice.  The first time, he lost.  That was not because he didn’t cheat, it was because he announced his vote too soon, and the other candidate then created enough fraudulent ballots to beat him.   He also cheated the second time, but he was smarter than his opponent then and he won.   Everyone know he cheated – 200 people voted at the last minute in the precinct that put him ahead.  They voted in strict alphabetical order.  The chances of that happening by coincidence are TRILLIONS to one.

The funny thing is, that had no effect on the effect of his policies.   He STILL ultimately pushed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare into law.

And in fact, his supporters – and many supporters of whoever – will justify that because for them to win is obviously good for the country.  G. Gordon Liddy never thought to apologize for Watergate.

There was cheating in the 1960 elections.   Kennedy won the West Virginia primary.  His supporters passed bags of cash around liberally.  He won the general election.  His win was narrow, and in part depended on the Daley machine in Chicago.  The only question to this day is whether he would have won Illinois in a clean election.  No one really knows.  Oh, Richard Nixon didn’t want to create a constitutional crisis, and he kept mostly quiet.

Back to LBJ – Both his and Goldwater’s supporters likely cheated in 1964.  But the election was such a blow-out that the cheating didn’t affect the Presidential results.  But no doubt there was cheating.

2020 was the same, and different at the same time.   There was cheating.  There’s always cheating.  But the Covid situation changed the manner in which we voted.  Fewer people went to the polls on election day.  But more people voted than ever before,  largely by absentee and mail-in balloting.  I voted by absentee because our office worked on Election Day.  Covid emerged two months before the first primaries.  The states had little time to design an inclusive balloting system that made it hard to cheat.

The Electoral College has voted.  The 2020 election is over.  Tomorrow, the results will be certified, and the Republicans are making a rather stupid point.  Were I in Congress as a Republican and  disapproved of the election, I’d just vote “present.”

Now, we can look to the weaknesses in the balloting systems.  We have about a year until the 2022 campaign season kicks off.

The goal is three-fold:  Count every legal vote, don’t count illegal votes and encourage voting by eliminating unnecessary barriers to exercising the franchise.

That being said, there will always be some fraud.  We can hope – but not guarantee – that it will not change results.

The biggest new wrinkle this year has been mail-in voting.  To vote by mail is FAR safer from an infection point of view that voting personally. 

At the polls, we have a number of people involved in the voting and counting.  The more people present, the less likely hanky-panky will occur.  And to eliminate most fraud, we would have vote-in-person and have poll workers who know the voter or who – from ID’s – can readily identify the voter.  “Real ID” – like we have for driver’s licenses - is a system which resists fraud.  However, not everyone gets a state-issued driver’s license or ID card.  Common perception is that vote-in-person and ID benefits the Republicans.  It certainly would result in people – citizens – who don’t have a state-issued ID from voting.

A big problem is that mail-in voting leaves the ballots where sometimes one single person can get at them, usually a postal worker or a person at the Courthouse.  If you know where the ballot is coming from, you can safely delete ballots and perhaps change the election results.   When one person can access ballots, there is little chance of detection.  

Where an election is close, a party can eliminate ballots from sharply tilted precincts and hurt the other side.  I always tell candidates to get the precinct by precinct numbers, so they will know where they are strong and where they are weak.  Even in a close state, there are precincts heavily prone to one party, by 2:1 or more.  If you eliminate 3 ballots which come from that area, you probably have take 2 from the other side and 1 from your side, and you have eliminated one ballot for the other side.  The stories of ballots found in a dumpster, etc., might be an example of that – committed by someone too stupid to bring a lighter or matches along.

So how do we make vote-by-mail legal but more secure?   Signature checks is one suggestion.   However, it takes some skill to detect a forged signature and also takes a LOT of time.  Fingerprints might be safer, but then we would have to depend on ordinary people producing a readable print.  Restricting mail-in voting to those who have a need might work, but then some people will not vote. 

Paper ballots, hand-counted, resist electronic misbehavior.  But that takes time.

In the meantime, Georgia is rocking to an orgy of legal election spending - over 500 Million Dollars – more than $100 for each eligible voter. 

I wish I had more concrete suggestions.

 

Mizpah!