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Dear Mr. Gates:

You have, by dint of your intelligence and sincerity, become a major spokesman for wealthy Americans calling for higher taxes. Since the nation’s budgetary problems will only be solved by combining spending reductions with tax increases, this is a compelling claim.

However, the devil, as they say, is in the details. Allow me to call three details to your attention:

1) Microsoft’s tax avoidance. Microsoft has become increasingly adept at parking its profits in low tax foreign jurisdictions, rather than paying U.S. taxes. After analyzing Microsoft’s financial statements, Tax Analysts’ Martin A. Sullivan recently concluded that Microsoft “has dramatically stepped up its efforts to take advantage of lax U.S. transfer pricing rules.” In lay terms, Microsoft is avoiding U.S. taxes by accounting maneuvers which shift its profits to low tax havens.

Of course, Microsoft is not alone in this behavior. However, Microsoft is the source of your family’s wealth and influence. I suggest that you start a campaign to press U.S. corporations to pay U.S. taxes and that you lead with Microsoft as the campaign’s first target.

2) Millionaires and billionaires are different. You are the leading proponent of the plan to establish an income tax in Washington State. The tax will be levied at a rate of 5% on annual incomes over $200,000 ($400,000 for couples). The rate will increase to 9% on annual incomes over $500,000 ($1,000,000 for couples).

Individuals earning these kinds of incomes are undoubtedly affluent. But few of them are software billionaires. Unfortunately, the Washington State levy will tax millionaires and billionaires at the same rates.

Many individuals triggering the first tier of the Washington income tax will be professionals like me. Many of the individuals triggering the higher tax level will be small businessmen and businesswomen. As to this latter group, the Washington tax will be among the nation’s highest. For these people, the tax will impose a noticeable burden and could lead to economic distortions such as a decision to leave Washington for a state with a low or no income tax.

It is neither fair nor efficient for the billionaires of Microsoft to pay the same marginal tax rates as these other taxpayers.

I suggest that you call for a third, substantially higher rate for the Washington State tax to apply to individuals such as you. The resulting revenues would permit a reduction of the rates applying to other, less affluent Washington State taxpayers.

3) The Gates Foundation is a tax shelter. The Gates Foundation does great work of which you and your family can be justifiably proud. But there is one thing the Gates Foundation doesn’t do: pay taxes.

You and your son have both been outspoken proponents of federal estate taxation. However, the resources you and he contribute to the Gates Foundation avoid such taxation. Moreover, the foundation, as a tax-exempt entity, pays no federal income tax.

I understand and applaud the charitable impulse which animates the Gates Foundation. My wife and I have established a private foundation in memory of our son though this fund is, needless to say, much smaller than the Gates Foundation.

It is, nevertheless, problematic to call for others to pay higher estate and income taxes while the Gates Foundation, one of the country’s largest, effectively shelters your and your son’s incomes and estates from the federal fisc.

I urge that the Gates Foundation annually and voluntarily

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at what happens when you judge too quickly. See his previous OUPblogs here.

In his press conference on July 22, President Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to call what the Cambridge police department did “stupid” was poor form. The president thought he was avoiding the hot spot when asked about the Gates arrest by saying that the controversy offered a “teachable moment.” But having admitted that he had imperfect knowledge of the facts, he went on and assumed that this particular incident invited a lesson about racial profiling and made the very indictment that his conversational segway was intended to avoid. In so doing, Obama confirmed conservatives’ belief that minorities love to whine about their beleaguered status (also another knee-jerk belief, incidentally) even if Obama could have made a case had he marshalled the evidence appropriately. Obama spoke like a liberal before he thought, and that was his mistake.

In so doing, he repeated the same mistake that Professor Gates made. Like Obama, Gates, too, jumped to the conclusion that Sgt Crowley was racist. I do not know if Sgt Crowley acted hastily in arresting the Professor for allegedly exhibiting “tumultous” behavior, so I won’t jump to conclusions but simply note my suspicion that there was probably a contest of egos on both sides. Those who have rushed to Crowley’s defense should ask themselves if they do not also have a knee-jerk reaction to give the benefit of the doubt to a law enforcement officer (or a soldier or a partisan affiliated with the Commander-in-Chief.)

Gates, Obama, and possibly Crowley were not the only people who have been jumping to conclusions, substituting unreflected intuition for a careful weighing of the evidence. Frank Luntz and his political students are encouraging Americans to become thoughtless automatons responding to carefully researched code words like “government takeover” and “health-care rationing.” The issue domain is different, but the error is the same.

It is very difficult to prove racial-profiling, for it demands an investigator to go inside the head of the alleged perpetrator. It is equally difficult to prove that the president’s and Democratic Congress’s plan for a “public option” is a precursor to a completely government-run health-care system. If it is not appropriate to rush to accuse someone of being racist, then it is at least premature to rush to accuse of someone of being socialist (assuming that that is a bad thing).

Those who are accusing Obama and Gates for rushing into judgment should look into the mirror to see if they too have not rushed to conclude that liberals are whiners and socialists who want a government takeover of health-care. At some level, we all have the instinct to cherry-pick the evidence to come to the conclusions we want.

Ideologies, like stereotypes, are cognitive cues or heuristics. They help us to “think” before we get the facts. They allow us to abdicate our duty to make sense of the world with our own independent judgment. They do the easy but intellectually dishonest work of guiding our reactions to the conclusions we want without us having to do the hard work of getting to know a person or a proposed policy before we came to a judgment. The people who are reinforcing such behavior in our politics are destroying our democracy and robbing us of our first freedom - the freedom of independent thought.

So the Gates controversy is a teaching moment, and the lesson is quite simple. Look before you leap; think before you conclude. It is probably the first lesson  of critical thinking, but two professors forgot it last week. If Obama wants us to learn this lesson, he should have been clearer about what the nature of his lapse was. It wasn’t that the president miscallibrated his words - for the question wasn’t about the intensity of what he said, but the very fact that he said something at all. Obama should have apologized for expressing what he felt and intuited without having first perused the evidence. If he had done that, he would have claimed the moral ground to shame some of his opponents in Congress into admitting that they too are doing the same thing in their knee-jerk opposition to what they call “Obamacare.”

By Edward Zelinsky

At their much anticipated White House meeting held last Thursday night over beer, President Obama, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sergeant James Crowley made a valiant effort to end the national controversy provoked by Sgt. Crowley’s arrest of Prof. Gates. However, these White House atmospherics, while well intended, cannot obscure the troubling questions which persist: Was there probable cause for Sgt. Crowley to conclude that disorderly conduct had occurred? If not, was the arrest, as President Obama initially opined, “stupid”? Of the irreconcilable statements advanced by Prof. Gates and Sgt. Crowley, which is true – and which is false?

Throughout the twentieth century, judges and legal scholars have grappled with the dilemma posed by the notion of disorderly conduct. On the one hand, individuals can behave in ways which unacceptably disrupt other persons and the community as a whole. On the other hand, the term “disorderly conduct,” by itself, is disorderly. This term is vague, giving no effective notice of what conduct is forbidden. Consequently, arresting officers may have great discretion to deem conduct as “disorderly.” In the worst case scenarios, constitutionally-protected expression and purely private behavior can be squelched as “disorderly.”

The drafters of the Model Penal Code (MPC) addressed this dilemma by limiting the concept of “disorderly conduct” to situations in which an individual deliberately or recklessly “cause(s) public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm.” From this perspective, there is no crime of disorderly conduct in private. Moreover, conduct is illegally disorderly only if an individual intentionally or recklessly inconveniences, annoys or alarms the public. In such decisions as Commonwealth v. Peace Chou, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts incorporated the MPC definition of “disorderly conduct” into Massachusetts law.

In light of this legal definition, Sgt. Crowley lacked probable cause to arrest Prof. Gates for disorderly conduct under either Sgt. Crowley’s description of events or Prof. Gates’. According to Prof. Gates’ narrative, he was arrested as he stepped onto his porch, before he made any public comments. As a legal matter, there is no disorderly conduct in Massachusetts without public impact.

Assuming instead the truth of Sgt. Crowley’s report, he still lacked probable cause to arrest Prof. Gates for disorderly conduct. Nothing in the police report suggests that Prof. Gates intended to inconvenience, annoy or alarm his neighbors or that his behavior, as described by Sgt. Crowley, satisfied the test of recklessness.

That, however, is not the end of the story.

President Obama in his July 22nd press conference called the arrest of Prof. Gates “stupid,” a term which implies that Sgt. Crowley acted irrationally, in bad faith, or both. Again, accepting Sgt. Crowley’s description of the events of that night, his decision to arrest Prof. Gates, while legally incorrect, was not “stupid” since, in Sgt. Crowley’s telling of the story, Prof. Gates’ behavior was abusive and intemperate. From this vantage, the arrest, while faulty, was understandable.

In contrast, accepting Prof. Gates’ statement as the correct version of events, what occurred that night was far worse than “stupid.” The narrative released by Prof. Gates describes him as calmly identifying himself to Sgt. Crowley as the occupant of his home. The Gates narrative then depicts Sgt. Crowley, without provocation or reason, arresting Prof. Gates for disorderly conduct when Prof. Gates stepped onto his porch, before Prof. Gates engaged in any public statements.

Each of these gentlemen, as well as the President, had his own reasons for participating in Thursday night’s brewski diplomacy. Nevertheless, these troubling questions persist. The carefully-crafted Gates and Crowley statements cannot be reconciled. In the former version, the arrest that night in Cambridge was totally unjustified. In the latter version, the arrest was understandable, albeit legally insufficient. Either way, President Obama’s initial characterization of the arrest as “stupid” was wrong, either unfair to Sgt. Crowley or too generous to him.

We should not mistake a feel good event with an authoritative resolution. Suds should not be confused with substance.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s health care debacle. See his previous OUPblogs here.

As the wise saying goes “if you’ve nothing good to say, don’t say anything.” But President Barack Obama went ahead anyway with a prime time press conference, and as Bill O’Reilly was right to observe on Wednesday night - he said practically nothing specific about what the shape of the health-care bill would look like and viewers were left scratching their heads.

President Obama wanted to let Congress take ownership of the bill, rather than hand them a fait accompli (as Hillary Clinton did back in 1993/4), I hear Democrats chant in his defense. But if Obama wants to stay on the side-lines, then he should do so consistently. Either be genuinely deferential to Congress and stay out of the picture until a consensus emerges, or take complete ownership of the agenda - don’t try to do both. Yet the president is back in the limelight doing prime-time press conferences, and attending town hall meetings in Cleveland and such. Obama should decide which way he wants to go. If he is the salesman-in-chief, then he has to have something to sell, if not his consumers would be left completely befuddled as to why he’s putting on a show for no particular reason at all.

Liberals are mad that Obama didn’t throw a few more punches at Republicans. I think many are unwilling to admit the more pointed fact that he just didn’t do a very good job at all, because he didn’t have much to say.

So Wednesday’s press conference was a squandered opportunity. We are not in 2008 anymore when Barack Obama would announce that he is giving a speech and the whole world would stop to listen. The clock is ticking on his presidential luster, and the next time he says “hey, listen to me,” it’s going to be that much harder.

Let us be clear why health-care reform has stalled, at least till the Fall. Because the Congress, and in particular the Senate Finance Committee could not agree on a way forward. I don’t see why the President and his advisers thought that a prime time press conference last Wednesday night would have gotten things moving. In fact it probably achieved the exact opposite, when we heard on Thursday morning from Senator Harry Reid that a Senate vote before the August recess would not be possible. The president’s time would have been better spent persuading his former colleagues up on the hill in private conversations to compromise on a bill. When they’ve got a bill and all/most are united, then go out and do the media blitzkrieg, by all means. Wednesday night just wasn’t the time for that.

So it looks like the Permanent Campaign is back. The President has chosen to go back to campaign mode, selling himself. Because without a specific plan to sell, all his public appearances amount to going public for the sake of going public. This strategy belies a serious misunderstanding of American politics. Personal approval ratings do not translate to public support for specific policy proposals (not that they were forthcoming) - the president should have known this by now. They barely even translate into congressional support for presidential policies.

This error - of going public with nothing specific to sell - was compounded, and probably encouraged, by a complete underestimation of the push back from the conservative wing of the Demcoratic party (the “Blue Dogs”) worried about spiraling deficits. These were the people Obama should have been talking to. And given he’s still out town hall-ing and speechifying, I’m not sure he fully understands what came over him.

To make matters worse, Obama had to pour fuel over the fire of the Henry Louis Gates controversy during the press conference, accusing the Cambridge police of of a “stupid” arrest when he had incomplete possession of the facts. Have something to say about anything all the time has become the rhetorical ethic of the modern presidency. Obama’s observance of this ethic was a disastrous distraction to what little point he had to make at his press conference. The news cycles are now spending more time covering the Gates controversy than they are covering the health-care debate.

I’m afraid to say - though this is water under the bridge - that Hillary Clinton would have known better. This week, for the first time in his fledgling presidency, Obama looked like a total novice in Washington. His 4th press conference was a waste of time, and probably the first time since Obama broke onto the national scene in 2004 that his rhetorical wizardry had fallen so flatly on death ears. He seems to have bought the bad conventional advice - whenever you’re in trouble, just go out and give a speech - wholesale. The president should take heed:

1. The public is less attentive between election years and he must have something meaningful to say if he wants to keep their attention.
2. Especially on a complex issue like health-care where there are too many details to cover, the media is much more likely to jump at an opportunity to take the path of least resistance to cover something juicier, like Henry Louis Gates and racial profiling.
2. Just because the public (still) loves Obama doesn’t mean that they will love what he is doing as president (and not as presidential candidate).
3. It is often more important to talk to members of Congress - the people who actually pass legislation - than to deliver speeches around the nation where the only tangible return of applause is a fleeting sense of psychic gratification that one is loved.

President Obama, it’s crunch time. Stop yakking.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects on the time before Obama takes office. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

In recent weeks, President-elect Obama has shown himself to be a cautious pragmatist. In keeping Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his cabinet, he is signaling to his liberal base that there will be no precipitous pullout from Iraq. In selecting Senator Hillary Cinton to be Secretary of State, he has endorsed her aggressive campaign stance toward negotiating with rogue-nations. We no longer hear about the windfall profit tax on oil companies that Obama had proposed during the campaign trail, and the next president is probably going to wait a while to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

Barney Frank said it best in response to Obama’s claim that there is only one president at a time, “I’m afraid that overstates the number of presidents we have at the present time.” There is so much frustration against the Bush presidency, and so much pent up anticipation for what is to come that if they had their way, Democrats would have moved inauguration day to the day after November 4. Liberals looking for change are doubtless disappointed and even agitated, but this is an administration-to-be saving its ammunition for the battles ahead.

The perceived prudence of the president-elect must be viewed in the light of the fact that he has no authority to do anything now. (He is not even a Senator anymore.) All the power he possesses now comes from the law of anticipated reactions. Until he takes the oath of office, he has no formal authority, though he possesses more power now than he ever will. Some call it a store of good will; journalists call it a honeymoon. But this is power that will not persist; it will start to dissipate just as Obama hits the ground running. As he finally sits down to to take the presidential test, and the distance between hope and reality, rhetoric and action narrows, his honeymoon, like the law of all good things, will end.

That is why I do not expect the prudence ex ante to continue ex post. Now is the calm before the storm. Come January 20, there shall be a flurry of activity and a big stimulus package which would include, among other things, a big infrastructure program to rebuild roads and bridges around the country. There is so much pent-up anticipation for Obama to use his electoral mandate that he is likely to benefit from the restraint he is exercising (and the angst he is causing) now. This man who has proved adept at beating the Clintons at their game during the primary season will not likely repeat their mistake of front loading his first 100 days with more than he can handle. His legislative agenda will not be cluttered, but it will surely be bold.