We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City, just across the street from Washington Square Park. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.
Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.
The cafe is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 2 blocks west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east & 1 block north. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.
TAX DEBATES FOR SKEPTICS:
IS IT IRRATIONAL TO BELIEVE YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY TAXES, THAT THE IRS IS USED AS A POLITICAL WEAPON, THAT TAX CUTS WILL PAY FOR THEMSELVES, OR THAT THE GOVERNMENT CAN SIMPLY PRINT MONEY INSTEAD OF TAXING US?
INTRODUCTION - THE SCOPE OF SKEPTICISM: SHOULD SKEPTICS DEBUNK PSEUDO-LAW, PSEUDO-SCANDALS & PSEUDO-ECONOMICS?
In honor of Tax Day, which is tomorrow, this discussion will focus on taxes - hold on, it's actually more interesting than you'd think!
I know taxes may seem like an odd choice for a skeptic meetup, since it's not a scientific subject and it tends to be a highly partisan topic where a person's views are mostly determined not by empirical evidence but by their political allegiances and their moral intuitions about what seems fair.
Following prominent skeptics like Steven Novella & Daniel Loxton, I think the skeptic movement should try to remain relatively apolitical, in the sense that - as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." I've tried to steer our meetups away from discussing issues that are purely partisan. In the hopes of reassuring prospective members of this meetup, I've mentioned this nonpartisan principle in the "What We're About" section of our Meetup's webpage, saying:
"Although we occasionally address political issues, we do so from a non-partisan, empirical approach. Any politician, pundit or political party that makes claims that are unsupported by logic & evidence are open for criticism. We typically avoid issues that are purely ethical questions, since science can only tell us how the world is not how it ought to be (i.e. we employ the "fact-value distinction" from philosophy)."
However, while taxes aren't a purely objective & factual topic that can be divorced from moral value judgements, some tax-related issues do overlap with the mainstays of skeptical inquiry, such as conspiracy theories, moral panics & pseudo-science...
The first section of this discussion will investigate the overlap between conspiracy theorists and "tax protestors" - i.e. people who refuse to pay certain taxes, often the income tax, because they believe that the tax laws are unconstitutional or otherwise invalid. "Tax protestors" are different from "tax resisters", who refuse to pay taxes as a form of political protest against the government's policies (often war), or a moral opposition to taxation in general, not out of a belief that the tax law itself is invalid. Tax protestors often use a wide variety of unusual legal arguments to support their position, and these arguments are commonly referred to as "pseudolaw" because they run contrary to well-established legal precedents and are highly unlikely to stand up in a court of law. We'll discuss the relationship between "pseudolaw" and pseudoscience, and we'll ask whether the belief that one isn't legally obligated to pay certain taxes is inherently irrational or simply an uncommon but logically coherent interpretation of the law that just happens to be unpopular with the IRS & tax court judges.
Several years ago, starting in 2013, there were allegations of IRS targeting of conservative non-profits that some people, particularly pundits on the political left, denounced as a "conspiracy theory". I thought this would be another interesting tax-related issue for us to discuss, since conspiracy theories are a common topic for skeptics. However, I think the IRS targeting allegations might better be referred to as a "scandal" or "pseudo-scandal" (depending on whether you feel there was genuine wrongdoing) as opposed to a "conspiracy theory". "Scandals" and "conspiracy theories" typically allege similar things - i.e. that a group of political or business elites colluded to do something morally wrong and/or illegal - but "scandals" typically denote an allegation that's received a lot of mainstream media attention while "conspiracy theories" typically denote allegations confined to obscure rumor mills & the followers of eccentric political agitators like Lyndon LaRouche & Alex Jones. Scandals are also similar to "moral panics" in that both attract heavy & sometimes excessive news coverage (a.k.a. a "media circus") and involve lots of moral grandstanding & scapegoating by political pundits, but moral panics tend to involve elites condemning "folk devils" on the fringes of society whereas scandals are intra-elite conflicts. For politicians, the point of a scandal is not merely to push for legal action against those accused of wrongdoing. Even if no one is criminally charged, politicians often seek to convict their opponents in the "court of public opinion" and damage their political prospects in the next election, and they also seek to rally their own supporters by showcasing their leadership & advocacy skills. The political scientist Brendan Nyhan has pointed out that scandals can be analyzed not only in terms of the level of the actual wrongdoing they uncover but also as "social constructs" that emerge predictably at certain points in the news cycle. We'll use Nyhan's approach and trace how the IRS targeting scandal dominated news coverage in the spring of 2013 but then dissipated over the summer as new facts emerged. We'll also ask whether in hindsight this was a "real scandal" that uncovered major illegal activity by key political players or a "pseudo-scandal" that exaggerated the importance of some minor mistakes by a few bureaucrats.
Another way that taxes related to a common skeptic concern is that both the political right & left often refer to each other's tax policies as "pseudo-economics". "Pseudo-economics" could be considered a close cousin of pseudoscience since economics is classified as a social science. However, the distinctions between mainstream economics, the highly speculative but still respectable theories of "heterodox economics" and the empirically false claims of "pseudo-economics" are a bit of unclear. Once reason for this lack of clarity is that there's a lot of disagreement among both pundits & scholars about whether or not economics is really "objective" or just a cover for ideology. It's also not hard to find some public intellectuals denouncing the entire field of economics as a "cargo cult science" that use lots of math & models to mimic the harder sciences without offering a high enough degree of predictive accuracy or easily testable claims. In fact, some economists have even criticized their own field when they feel their colleagues have overstepped the bounds of what their field can reliably recommend given the complexity of the global economy. We've covered this debate in a previous Skeptics meetup entitled, "Should Skeptics Defer to the Economic Consensus" - you can check out the discussion outline here: https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/235264056/
In that previous discussion, I argued that economic issues are so important that it's almost impossible remain completely agnostic about them - and that would be our only recourse if we dismissed the entire field of economics as bunk. I also argued that economics is "scientific" enough, in the sense of having an empirical basis, that (as with other social sciences like psychology, criminology, political science, sociology & history) we should generally defer to the experts when there's a high degree of bipartisan consensus. Starting from this premise, we can ask whether certain economic theories that don't enjoy a bipartisan consensus should be classified as "pseudo-economics", especially when these theories are heavily criticized even by many economists that share its normative values & goals. In the second half of this discussion, we'll look at two controversial economic theories that have both been in the news recently - "Supply-Side Economics" and "Modern Monetary Theory" - and ask whether or not they deserve to be dismissed as "pseudo-economics" and have their policy prescriptions ignored. We'll also tie these theories into current policy debates about the effects of the Trump tax cuts and the feasibility of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Medicare-for-all plan.
NOTE: This meetup will be preceded by a related discussion on taxes hosted by the Philly Political Agnostics and running from 3-5pm. They'll be covering the moral philosophy of taxation, optimal tax theory from economics, the psychology of taxpayers, and the political science of tax policy. To check out the discussion outline & RSVP, go here: https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/259946508/
