Watching People Burn Trailer

Martian Lit has released a trailer for my book Watching People Burn. It's short (just over a minute), was a lot of work, and is really good. Please watch it and, if you like it, share it on your preferred social network!

This is the first video from Martian Lit, so if you like this sort of stuff, it would really help to see those YouTube views count upward. Many, many thanks!

Announcing Shedding Skin: Two Tales of Horror and Identity

For those of you who don't know, The Slave Factory is a short book by me, published at the beginning of this year by Martian Lit. It's 60 pages in print and 99 cents on Kindle.

Response to it, both critically and commercially, has been strong. And I just love the format. It's a quick read on Kindle, but enough to really feel substantial. And I absolutely love it as a floppy little book.

So we're doing it again. Its successor is titled Shedding Skin: Two Tales of Horror and Identity. It's in the same format. Only it has two stories, instead of one. And they're in the horror genre, instead of being historical fiction. (And like everything I've been publishing lately, the work's been written for literally years, and I'm just editing them for publication.)

Here's the cover:

Shedding Skin is set for publication later this month. Yes, that means I should have two books published in April -- including the full-length novel Nira/Sussa, some 12 years in the making.

Nira/Sussa on Its Way!

As of yesterday, I'm completed my final full edit of Nira/Sussa, the transgressive literary novel that everyone either seems to love or hate with vitriolic passion. And that was awarded a Ph.D., despite being condemned as pornographic.

It should be available for purchase by the end of the month.

I've been working on this novel, as far as I can tell, since fall of 1999. Editing a page of it -- which I've done, over and over, with every page -- is usually harder for me than writing a new page. This has been grueling, soul-wrenching process, beyond anything I could hope to describe.

I hope you like it. But I really, really hope you talk about it. Everywhere. Because the novel is a challenging story with vital things to say. I passionately believe this is an important, even historic novel -- or I wouldn't have thrown such a vast portion of my life into it.

Free Kindle Books, Today and Tomorrow Only

My historical screenplay Watching People Burn is a fictional portrayal of the worst school massacre in U.S. history, which happened -- shockingly -- in rural Michigan in 1927.

My short story The Slave Factory examines a rarely discussed element of the Atlantic slave trade -- the slave factory -- and how slavery warps the psychology of both slave and master alike.

Both are available for free on Kindle this weekend (24-25 March). Go download!

Watching People Burn

The Slave Factory

More Yelena, More Miracleman

Even though I've been lax in updating this blog, I've been plenty busy.

Today, chapter 8 of The Many Lives of Yelena Moulin, my aggressive, sexy, existential sci-fi novella, is up on Martian Lit. As usual, it's accompanied by stunning original art of the great Doug Smock, and I particularly love his illustration for this chapter.

Also today, the 11th installment in my analysis of Alan Moore's Miracleman is up on Sequart. This concludes my look at the future interlude "The Yesterday Gambit" and brings me through Warrior #4.

In other news, Sequart's Teenagers from the Future: Essays on the Legion of Super-Heroes is now on Kindle. And Sequart's newest documentary film, Comics in Focus: The Image Revolution, is on Kickstarter.

I've been working way too hard on the final edits of my literary-transgressive novel, Nira/Sussa. It's grueling, and it continues to be so. But it's wrapping up, I assure you.

Many thanks for your support.

Why Obama Will Win

No one expects Obama, in November, to achieve the blow-out 365-to-173 electoral college victory he achieved in '08. But demographics are on his side.

Everyone knows Republicans have held the presidency far more than Democrats since 1968. Even Democrats have an ingrained idea that winning the White House is an uphill battle. But if Obama were a Republican, no one would be worrying.

Democrats have won three of the last five presidential elections. In the last 20 years, the Democratic presidential candidate has won 60% of the time.

Those haven't been small victories either. Clinton won in '92 with 370 votes in the electoral college, and in '96 with 379. Obama won in '08 with 365. (A candidate needs 270 to win.)

Even more importantly, the two Republican wins in this period were by incredibly slim majorities. Bush won in 2000 with just 271 electoral votes, but lost the popular vote and probably lost the electoral vote too, had Florida's votes been counted more precisely. Even as an incumbent, Bush won in 2004 with 286 electoral votes, an incredibly slim victory.

Average the last five presidential elections together, and you get Democrats with 326.6 electoral votes -- a decisive victory.

And there's a reason for that: the nation's become more liberal. The old social wedge issues that used to deliver moderates for the Republicans now swing slightly in Democrats' favor, and that's a trend that's only growing more pronounced. The nation's also becoming more diverse, which helps too.

Republicans ought to be moderating themselves to keep up with the times. Instead, the faultlines between the Reagan coalition have splintered open, and we're watching an all-out war between the insiders and the know-nothings, the fiscal conservatives and the social conservatives, the statesmen and the Tea Party. Republicans now have to take extreme views on abortion and contraception and gay rights and religion simply to compete for the candidacy. These positions have only become more and more extreme, even as the nation's moved the other way.

Of course, looking at only the last 20 years of presidential elections conveniently avoids the Republican blow-out victories of 1980, '84, and '88, when Reagan and Bush won with 489, 525, and 426 electoral votes, respectively. Each of those elections were won with majorities eclipsing any Democratic ones of the last 20 years.

That's part of why Republicans so lionize Ronald Reagan, even as their party has drifted -- incredibly -- to Reagan's right. 1980-1992 was the Republican Golden Age. But it's gone, and it has been for 20 years.

Trying to duplicate it, to go back to "bold Reagan conservatives," ignores the fact that the nation has changed.

In fact, the Republican presidential victories of the 1980s were the tail end of the Republican "Southern Strategy," which used Democratic support for the Civil Rights Act to transform the South into a Republican voting block. It was a strategy based on dividing the nation on social issues, exactly as Republicans now falsely claim that Obama is doing on economic issues.

And it worked. It delivered the presidency to the Republican party every year from 1968 onwards -- with the exception of Jimmy Carter in '76. And Carter needed Watergate to win. Saddled with a horrible economy and runaway inflation, Carter was doomed to be a one-termer from the start. Especially when Reagan was able to galvanize the nation with a smiling, optimistic campaign premised on returning America to what was then seen as its conservative Golden Age: the 1950s.

So from 1968 to 1992, presidential elections show almost absolute Republican dominance, based upon using social wedge issues. This 24-year period is divided into two stages. The first, 1968-1980, includes two Nixon terms, including the disaster of Vietnam and culminating in Watergate, which delivers Carter to the White House for a single term. But that's a blip, and it sets up stage two: 1980-1992, when Reagan went hard right, both socially and fiscally, but hid it behind a smiling face. Under him, the religious right rose to dominance of American Christianity, and Republicans thought the White House would be theirs forever.

But they'd gone too far, and the nation was shifting. Clinton in 1992 needed Ross Perot as a third candidate, siphoning off Republican votes. After he won reelection in '96, Republicans actually impeached him and spoke openly of how he didn't deserve the presidency -- the White House being a Republican position. But in fact, the nation was already transitioning.

The effective presidential tie in 2000 was probably the point at which this transition began tipping in the Democratic direction. Sure, Bush eked out a 2004 win, as an incumbent in a time of war, but with historically weak electoral results. And by the end of his second term, the global economy lay in ruins and the U.S. had never been weaker militarily.

Obama's victory wasn't only a repudiation of Bush. It was an indication of America's changing demographics, without which a black president could never have been elected.

Barring some sort of catastrophic misstep or nuclear-level disaster, Obama's going to coast to reelection. Republicans know it, and that's why so many potentially strong candidates have stayed out of the 2012 race.

But that's part of a bigger picture, in which we're likely to enter a period of Democratic dominance of the presidency. A period in which the Republican party pays the price for the same racial and social stances that allowed it to achieve dominance from 1968-1992.

What used to win elections is now an albatross around the party's neck, and that party's not moving to remove it. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In retrospect, we'll probably see Obama as the moderate he is -- on the tail end of a transition from Republican social values to Democratic ones. After all, Obama's record is distinctly moderate: outflanking the right on foreign policy (killing bin Laden, anyone?) and with domestic successes all defined by their political moderation (such as insurance reform in lieu of universal health care). If he's liberal or somehow overly Democratic, it's solely by virtue of his competence. His only liability is the slow economic turnaround -- but all the trend lines are up, after Bush left the economy in a Great Depression-level pit.


The real question isn't whether Obama will win reelection, barring an unpredictable catastrophe.

It's what the increasingly liberal Democratic presidents of the next 20 years are going to look like, once we're past this transitory period and Republicans start paying the price in earnest for the regressive policies that no longer win elections -- but which the party is now screaming with even greater anger, like any religious or racial majority drifting forever into the minority.

"We are all one magical thunderclap away from some really ugly shit."

Over on Sequart, the new installment of my continuing look at Alan Moore's Miracleman is up.

"She could feel it, like she’d never died."

Over at Martian Lit, the fifth chapter of my serialized sci-fi fiction The Many Years of Yelena Moulin is up.

If you want to start at the beginning, here's the link to chapter one.

Each chapter is accompanied by original art by Doug Smock.

More Miracleman and New Martian Lit Material

The fourth installment of my analysis of Alan Moore's Miracleman is out on Sequart. In it, I look at the powerful depiction of super-hero sexuality in the opening of chapter three ("When Johnny Comes Marching Home").

Over at Martian Lit, the first piece of fiction by someone other than me is up. It's called "Life, Limb, and the Devil's Dissent," by Mark Rapacz, with original artwork by Chris Coffey. It's simply beautiful and well worth reading.

Martian Lit is the publisher of my own free serialized fiction, The Many Lives of Yelena Moulin, as well as two books by me that are currently available on Kindle for 99 cents, and free to borrow for Amazon Prime members: Watching People Burn and The Slave Factory. Martian Lit will also shortly be publishing my transgressive novel Nira/Sussa. These are excellent works that are just begging for your attention.

That is all.

On Flat Taxes, Reaganomics, Progressivism, and What Capitalism Means

There's a reason people are sympathetic with flat tax proposals. They're simple, and they seem fair.

Economically, this simplicity comes with a big advantage. Everyone knows the U.S. tax code is vast and unwieldy. Each citizen spends far too many hours, which might otherwise be used in productive endeavors, handling their taxes each year. Multiplied across the entire population, that adds up to a tremendous loss -- one both substantial and very real.

And all these deductions and loopholes are disproportionately manipulated by the wealthy, who have the resources and the financial interest to devote to ferreting them out. As a result, many feel that the tax code is a labyrinth that can be navigated only by the rich, who typically pay an effective tax rate that's far less than their stated marginal rate. We've created a vast, opaque, and bureaucratic system that requires huge amounts of time and money to navigate, none of which goes to investing in new businesses or anything else productive. Simplifying the tax code would free up these resources, stop people from gaming the system, and also have unpredictable benefits like lowered stress for the population.

Of course, flat taxes also have a huge disadvantage. The U.S. tax code has always been progressive, meaning that the rich pay far higher percentages of their income -- at least, before all those deductions. In fact, it's far less progressive today than at any other point in modern history. In 2012, the highest marginal rate is 35%, applied to incomes over $388,351 -- not including capital gains, gifts, estates, deductions, etc. During World War I, the top rate was a whopping 79%, on incomes over $5,000,000 ($80.7 million in 2011 dollars). The lowest bracket at that time was only 4% -- far lower than today. The top rate peaked in 1944 at 94%, applied to incomes over $200,000 ($2.54 million in 2011 dollars).

If you think these rates were only due to war efforts, you'd be wrong: in 1954, the top rate was still 91% (still applied to incomes over $200,000, though that had dropped to $1.67 million in 2011 dollars). During the Reagan administration, the top rate dropped, over a series of tax cuts, from 70% to 28%, and by the last cut, this rate applied to everyone making over $29,750 ($56 thousand in 2011 dollars) -- the lowest, most anti-progressive top bracket in U.S. history.

The top U.S. tax bracket (marginal rate) by year.

A few things are worth noting immediately about these statistics, besides the obvious fact that the U.S. tax code has always been progressive -- and historically, far more progressive than it is today. The first is that the top bracket, until Reagan, was set at far greater levels than it is today. This is important, because it essentially means that there's a flat tax above this level, beyond which everyone's treated the same. The highest bracket peaked in 1936 at $80.7 million in 2011 dollars. This compares to today's highest bracket of $379,150. In other words, the more filthy rich you were in the past, the more likely you were getting hit with a higher rate. Today, someone making $1,000,000 or even $100,000,000 is treated just like someone making $379,151. There's no additional tax penalty above that top bracket, and that has a lot to do with how the very top American earners have grown disproportionately with the rest of us.

Also, there used to be a lot more tax brackets than there are today. That's another feature of progressive tax codes, because it allows for more gradations based on income. The first permanent income tax, in 1913, had seven brackets. In 1917, there were 21 brackets. This increased to 55 brackets in 1932. From 1942-1981, including the entire post-war period until Reagan, there were 24-26 tax brackets. That's was cut down all the way to two brackets in 1988, and it's since increased back to six. Still, that's an incredibly low number, and multiple tax brackets allow for a nice progressive gradation, rather than suddenly hitting people with far greater taxes when they hit certain thresholds.

For some, this progressive quality to the U.S. tax code, present all along and mostly far greater than today, is unfair. It certainly seems so, superficially, when one hears that someone making $379,150 will pay 35%, compared to the lowest tax bracket of 10%. Many right-wingers have called this "redistribution of wealth." Which, of course, it is: that high rate of 35% allows for the low rate of 10%, which helps the poor.

What everyone seems to miss, while complaining about "redistribution of wealth," is that the alternative is basically unthinkable. It's been this way since the first permanent income tax in 1913. The progressive tax code helps with income inequality, by not taxing the poor at the same rate as the rich. The poor save a little on taxes, and that means that they'll have a better quality of life. The little the poor are taxed means a lot more to them, since they're trying to make ends meet, than the high rates do to the rich, who have far more money to spare.

Progressive tax policy also allows for upward mobility. America's proud of the American Dream, in which people can rise from poverty into great wealth. That happens far more rarely today in the U.S. than almost ever before, and the U.S. is now lagging behind perhaps 10 other nations in upward mobility. (The exact number of other nations depends on the study and the method of its calculations.) The bottom line is that America's now lagging behind other nations in, of all things, the American Dream.

That's not merely an emotional argument. It's also an economic one.

Reaganomics, then a fringe idea dismissed by the Republican establishment, centrally believed that the economy was stimulated best by giving more money to the rich, because the rich are the ones who do the hiring. Give more money to the rich, and they'll use that money to hire more people.

Or so the theory went. But it hasn't worked, no matter what Republicans claim. In fact, the economy has grown at a slower rate, since Reagan began radically diminishing the progressive features of the tax code. True, the economy took off under Reagan, especially at the end of his first term. But that came as part of a recovery from a recession, in which the economy was undergoing a natural upswing as part of normal business cycles. By the end of Reagan's anti-progressive reforms, the stage had been set for the recession under Bush, which included a massive bailout of the Savings and Loans.

That natural recovery after recession, under Reagan, has confused matters ever since. But Reaganomics got a second go -- albeit a less extreme one -- under George W. Bush, and the result was a period of slow growth that should have been much faster, followed by the disastrous collapse of 2007 and 2008.

This gets us into why Reaganomics doesn't work. It presumes that the rich, given more money, will invest that money in ways that "trickle down" to the rest of the population. And certainly, this happens to some degree. But most of the rich already have more than enough money and ability to borrow to fund their plans to finance business expansion. And if the rich put that money under the mattress, or into overseas operations, it doesn't produce any American jobs. Most of that added money to the rich ends up getting put into financial investments, as the rich try to earn a return on all this money. This could be stocks, which supplies extra money to companies, which in turn might get invested. But supplying the rich with giant pools of money that crave somewhere to go is also a dangerous thing, because it creates demand for investments beyond the traditional stocks and bonds. Thus, the growth in hedge funds and bizarre financial instruments that ended up packaging mortgages into bundles that could be traded and insured -- which helped contribute to the 2007-2008 crisis.

In short, creating giant pools of money seeking investment opportunities can produce all kinds of unexpected and destructive side effects, which we've painfully and recently seen can wreck the global economy. And very little of this goes into creating jobs, much less manufacturing or anything beyond moving money around.

Now, consider the alternative: making the tax code more progressive. Instead of using tax reforms to give huge amounts of money to the already privileged few, we give far smaller amounts to a far greater number of people. We don't know that the rich will use their windfalls to employ more people. But we do know that those struggling to make ends meet will spend the dollars they get. This doesn't directly employ anyone, but it's spread throughout the economy. It goes to pay for delayed home improvements, for dinner at local restaurants, for extra Christmas gifts, and for making payments on credit cards.

So if what we want is to create incentives for increasingly bizarre financial investments, Reaganomics is a great idea. If what we want to do is to increase sales to U.S. businesses across the board, trusting consumers to make the best decisions about which products and services are worth their dollars, progressivism is where it's at. It's actually far more likely to unleash the magic of capitalism than lining the silk pockets of the super-rich.

That's not to say that tax relief for the rich and for businesses has no positive effect, merely that helping the poor and middle-class is a lot more direct way of stimulating the economy. And it has the added benefit of being more humane, because those small amounts can make big differences in the lives of struggling people.

This is actually an entirely intuitive result. The #1 reason why people aren't buying more isn't that the stores need more money to employ more people and get new products out. It's that the consumers don't have enough money to spend.

If you trust capitalism, you trust consumers, over time, to choose the stores and the products that deserve to succeed or fail. Giving consumers more money gives them more ability to pick these winners and losers. Giving more money to the game's current winners -- the rich -- isn't remotely as good at encouraging future winners. If you've got a new product, you should want customers empowered with the money to buy it, not a governmental stimulus based on the success of your last product.

It's here that income disparity becomes far more than a theoretical or moral argument. As income disparity becomes more extreme, the poor and increasingly the middle class can lose their ability to purchase goods and services. That means that businesses increasingly don't have customers -- the one thing a business absolutely needs. Sure, businesses catering to the rich might continue to thrive -- as they have, in the current economy. But all the other businesses feel the pinch, as their customer base feels the pinch.

There's one other thing to consider, when it comes to the argument that "redistribution of wealth" is somehow anti-capitalistic. Capitalism works best when people have equality of opportunity. That's why we break up monopolies: the capitalistic game breaks down, when someone has a monopoly that's powerful enough to prohibit competition, because it's competitive forces that make capitalism work. If someone can't get an innovative product to market, we all suffer. Equally, we want innovative Americans to have the economic freedom to create new products and new businesses. We don't want our young innovators trapped in a cycle of poverty, because they'll spend all their time trying to survive, rather than having the time and the financial freedom to experiment with a new product or service or business model.

Nothing represents a worse loss to a capitalistic economy than a kid who might build the next Apple or the next Google instead trapped in a cycle of minimum-wage jobs, toiling for 60 hours a week to support himself and exhausting his mental and physical energy simply to pay the bills. I'm not saying that he shouldn't have to work while putting together his potentially economy-changing innovation, but he shouldn't have to work so hard, and in such a hopeless cycle of debt, that he never ends up innovating in the first place.

A progressive tax structure isn't punishing success. No one's going to fail to implement a great business idea because he might, if successful, have to pay an extra five percent in taxes. This extra revenue should go to pay for the costs of capitalism's playing field, such as the roads and police and schools and trash pick-up that allow businesses to transport goods, their employees to be literate, and their customers to get to stores. This extra revenue should also go to leveling the playing field of capitalism, so that customers have a little more money to spend, and thus vote with their dollars for the businesses that deserve to win or to lose. And this extra revenue should also go to creating the circumstances by which the next guy with a great business idea has a shot at implementing it, so he too can become successful.

So a progressive tax structure is indeed "redistribution of income." But it's not really a Robin Hood-like, quasi-socialist scheme. It's actually thoroughly capitalistic. It's part of the cost of maintaining capitalism. And without it, just like without the breaking up of monopolies, capitalism itself can grind to a halt, descending into a system of haves and have-nots that not only slows the economy (because customers have less money to spend) but also deprives that economy of the wonderful free-market innovative power lying unharnessed in those have-nots.

Of course, anything can go too far. I don't think anyone credible wants a return to a 94% tax bracket. We certainly don't want a tax code that's so progressive that it paralyzes businesses that become successful. Or removes the incentive for successful people to try new things and grow more successful. No one sane would wants that.

But we also can't afford, as believers in capitalism, to have anything other than a progressive tax structure.

And if you look at the rise of income inequality in the United States, it's clearly tied to the current economic downturn. True, there's instability and fear in the marketplace, which can cause businesses to play it safe. That's all the more reason not to infuse businesses with cash, because this uncertainty about the future will prevent them from hiring as much as they otherwise might. The key is to get consumer spending up, as fast as possible. Only this will reassure businesses: if business picks up, hiring will follow. The reason consumer spending has been so sluggish isn't because the average American is hoarding his money, the way the banks are, in response to this uncertainty. Most consumers don't have this luxury. The reason is because they don't have enough disposable income, and that's intimately related to income inequality. The most direct way to help the economy is to get cash into consumers' hands.

This need for a progressive tax structure is the reason why a flat tax would be a disaster. It might seem fair. It might seem like a pure, capitalist approach -- a level playing field. But it's not. It's profoundly anti-capitalist.

Yet there's no denying, as previously explained, that simplification of the tax code would also be good for a capitalist economy. A streamlined tax code would eliminate the loopholes that pervert capitalist decisions, encouraging behavior that wouldn't make sense normally. It would also cut down on the time and money spent navigating the tax code, energies which should be available for proper capitalist endeavor.

What's needed, then, is a radically simplified tax code -- but one that's at least as progressive, if not more so, than what we have now.