Last year Mark Cuban made headlines when he paid his $276 million tax bill. While his outspoken support for more liberal causes made some pundits ask if he was paying more than what he owed. he said that he pays what he owes. “This country has done so much for me, I’m proud to pay my taxes every single year,” Cuban went on to say that while he doesn’t expect all of his tax money to be used wisely, he’s proud to give back to the country. “I’ve said it for years. After military service, paying your taxes is the most patriotic thing we can do,” he wrote. I took note of that and it caused me to upgrade my respect for Mark Cuban accordingly. In my view, he is a wise man for seeing that the foundation of his wealth has come because of the infrastructure and governance provided by our great country and its government, as flawed as it may sometimes prove to be.
My red friends are forever complaining about their taxes and furthermore saying that government does nothing well. They have joined the ranks of those who feel that anything that can be done to decrease government is a good thing. That simply does not sit well with me. Our government is what has allowed our nation to prosper all these years and grow to be the greatest country on earth. I do not understand how people cannot see that. Let’s be clear, I do understand why people think government is inefficient. Who among us hasn’t waited around the DMV (of whatever state) wondering why government service is inefficient and why government employees are so apathetic. That is certainly the stereotype interaction we have mostly come to expect and believe. Strangely enough, I had to go into the DMV offices recently to renew my license. Once you get to 70, the California DMV insists that your license renewal be done in person, so I got a long overdue chance to see how things were at the DMV. To begin with, I was able to book an online appointment that allowed me to be served more or less immediately. That alone was an upgrade. Then, my interaction was both quick and efficient, including doing a rudimentary vision test and having a new photo taken. Within 10 minutes I walked out with a temporary license, good for five years, with the permanent one due through the mail within two weeks (it arrived exactly when due). I don’t go into the DMV for vehicle registration renewals, that all happens online with the new registration and license plate sticker coming in the mail. From online applications to payment protocols to my in-person license renewal, I would argue that the DMV is at least as efficient as any private sector interactions I have. And attitudinally, the DMV personnel were pleasant and motivated. I wish my private sector service interactions were half as efficient and pleasant.
As we are hearing every day about the DOGE efforts to pare down and eliminate government infrastructure, the opposition is filling us in on some facts that many of us were heretofore unaware. I was interested to learn that most of the agencies that are being attacked by DOGE have the same or fewer employees than they had 50 years ago. That is my adult lifespan and I can say with some assurance that very few private sector businesses could claim the same. In fact, with the doubling of our population during that time, its appropriate to say that the efficiency of our government might be far greater than we like to suggest.
When I worked in the 1980’s on the deleveraging of Emerging Market countries through the transformation of sovereign debt into things like privatization-based equity, I saw some value in the privatization drive. Government inefficiency in younger republics with less tradition in the rule of law was a very real opportunity for improvement, especially with more efficient role models like the United States to reference. That is the same role models that is in the crosshairs of the Republican Party now.
The Trump Administration, the sponsor of whatever we want to call the DOGE efforts (it defies description since one moment Trump says Musk is in charge and the next minute in court filings or testimony, Musk has nothing to do with the running or administration of DOGE, not to mention that DOGE is not an agency or an official arm of the government…not even a quasi-governmental organization), is making a headline issue out of dismantling the “Deep State” and “draining the swamp” of “graft, inefficiency and abuse”. When you combine that with the efforts to dramatically reduce income taxes and government regulation, it is fair to say that the overall effect of the Administration is the destruction of the American government as we know it. More than a few astute observers have likened the initiative to what happened in Russia starting in the late 1980s with the dismantling of the Soviet Union. The similarity is not just about the destruction of the mechanisms of state and the bureaucracy, but about taking all of the 75 years worth of Communist public ownership of Russian infrastructure and diminishing its value to the point where the privatization of everything formed the basis of accumulation of those assets by the new class of Russian oligarchs. As I see in today’s New York Times that the current government efforts (part of the Biden legacy) to improve and ubiquitousness of broadband internet access are expected to be replaced by Elon Musk’s StarNet system, much like Musk’s SpaceX has already replaced much of NASA. Kinda sounds like a Russian oligarch play doesn’t it?
It is my belief that the infrastructure of the United States government is one of the great strengths of the country which allows it to provide a platform for prosperity for its citizens. I worked in a highly regulated industry for my whole career and while I know that not all regulation is productive, it is my belief that the vast majority of it is both necessary for a properly functioning and fair economy and more judicious than not. Free markets are a myth just like unbounded individual liberty in an 8 billion person world is a myth. Regulation is what keeps free markets functioning for versus against the citizenry. Government regulation and infrastructure is what allows individuals the ability to worry less about the communal necessities of life and free to explore and expand their individual freedom in the directions of their choosing.
The current efforts to curtail the main revenue source of the country, the taxing enforcement by the IRS, should be a clear message to all that Trump and Musk want nothing more than to destroy the country in order to take advantage of it all for their own purposes. What other rational reason could there be? What’s funny is that despite all this dismantling and destruction of infrastructure by the United States, our friends in Russia are trying desperately to regain the past glory and structure of the Soviet Union, the system that created Vladimir Putin in the first place. He must be snickering that while Trump destroys our country, he is rebuilding his. The irony is too thick for words.
There is no more iconic billionaire and advocate for capitalism in the United States than Warren Buffet. In his annual Berkshire Hathaway letter to investors this year, Buffet put it best as he paid $27 billion in corporate income tax due (the largest corporate tax ever paid in U.S. history): “Thank you, Uncle Sam. Someday your nieces and nephews at Berkshire hope to send you even larger payments than we did in 2024. Spend it wisely. Take care of the many who, for no fault of their own, get the short straws in life.” There is a principled billionaire (notably NOT an oligarch, by my standards) who understands the importance of American infrastructure and also understands the importance of the welfare state aspects of government. This is just good old common sense.