chaircrusher: if you don't know what the fuck you're doing, don't bother voting.
optic: someone had a big rant yesterday about people who dont vote. i was tempted to point out what a waste of time voting is and suggest she give money instead, by why get into it
optic: giving money is the new voting imho
rich: voting matters in local politics
rich: imho
rich: and in tight races
optic: sure, the smaller the pool of voters the more likely your vote will count
optic: but even in a local race thats tight the probability that your 1 vote will make a difference is miniscule
optic: if you can magnify your vote by convincing others or getting them to turn out, a bit more. or magnify it by donating money for ads and gotv
optic: but 1 vote is pretty unlikely to matter
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Alex Tabarrok kicks off an interesting discussion about federal taxes and progressivity with this post showing who pays how much by income quintile. The interesting stuff is really in the comments rather than the original post -- people dissect the table, add additional information, and argue the economics and the politics. One comment I especially, liked, from someone responding to the fact that the people at the low end of the economic scale account for very little of tax income, was this:

As a mild libertarian I have to ask what is the point of taxing the poor and middle class. Why not just start taxing income over 80 K at a flat 15 percent rate and leave it be. Why do we need to tax people making below 80 K when obviously their tax contributions are meaningless to the federal government?

keph, please read and tell me what you think.

I've been leaning this way for a while, but I think I really am a John Edwards supporter again this year (I actually went to the bother of caucusing for him in 2004, god knows why). I came to this realization while reading this. It's less that that article convinced me than that it made me realize that I keep hoping something unforeseen will cause Edwards to catch up to the frontrunner(s), and that both Obama and Hillary have major minuses for me. So, go John. I guess in Maarten's spirit I should now put my money where my mouth is and send the guy some money.

I find this whole SCHIP thing kind of entertaining. I mean, beyond whatever political interest I may have in the actual outcome. Whatever your view of the merits of the thing, the fact that Bush actually said the words "it provides health care to too many children" is hilarious. What next, he goes on tv to announce that, in fact, apple pie is overrated and baseball is sorta gay? He really misses Karl Rove, huh. Like, if I were some kind of Democratic strategist, or just someone who liked being a wealthy smartass, here is the commercial I would air on TV (except with actual numbers plugged in instead of the ones I made up):

Visuals: Stacks and stacks and stacks of money. Some kind of chart showing trends going up stratospherically.
Voiceover [a trustworthy sounding male voice, who you instinctively believe and respect]: Since gaining power, President George W. Bush and the Republican-controlled congress have increased discretionary domestic spending by 500 billion dollars, the largest increase in our history.

Visuals: posh-looking seniors playing golf. Businessy looking fellows (somehow obviously drug company executives) chomping on cigars and literally hauling bags of money, with the traditional dollar sign on the side, out of the white house and capitol building. Pharmaceutical factories running at full tilt.
Voiceover: In 2003, the Republican congress passed, and President Bush signed into law, a 200 billion dollar drug plan for seniors, which includes the wealthiest retirees in its coverage and has paid out billions of dollars to drug companies.

Visuals: hollow-cheeked poor children on crutches. A small child with some kind of ghastly wound being literally turned away from a hospital door by a well-dressed beancountery guy holding what appears to be an extremely expensive looking diagnosis. More cigar-chomping fellows actually unable to fit all their dollar-sign-decorated bags of money into their oversized Bentleys and like having their chauffeurs shoving the money in the door a la those commuter-stuffing guys on Tokyo trains during rush hour. A family apparently selling off their children (ill-looking and/or horrifyingly wounded with incredibly large brown eyes filled with tears and looking pleadingly at the camera), whose health care they cannot afford, off to a wealthy family from the city.
Voiceover: This year, President Bush vetoed a bill, and congressional Republicans helped him sustain that veto, which would provide health care to an additional 10 million poor and middle class children, because they considered its 5 billion dollar price tag too high.

Visuals: stack of 200 billion dollars (very large) next to stack of 5 billion dollars (noticeably smaller). Pie-chart-type graphic showing what a tiny percentage this is of the annual budget. Possible reiteration of sick/wounded children visual motif in background.
Voiceover: [emphatic pause]

Visuals: Bush delivering speech
Bush: It provides health care to too many children.

Visuals: sick-looking and possibly injured child (crutches?) in foreground looking unhappily confused.
Voiceover: what the fuck?

I'd usually rather not bother talking/posting about politics, but my center-left libertarian principles are driven to utter disgust. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick pretty much captures the utter contemptibleness of congressional democrats' utter surrender on alberto gonzales and warrantless wiretapping. Their current message is basically: "alberto gonzales is a lying sack of shit who should be fired, therefore let's give him the power to spy on anyone he wants with absolutely no external checks". Most of the republicans at least follow a consistent principle (with which I utterly disagree) that security trumps privacy/liberty. The only consistent principle I can find among democrats is idiocy. It's disturbing that the executive branch would make this kind of power grab, but power grabs are natural, and much of the constitution is based around the knowledge that they will happen and that bureaucratic checks and balances are the best protection. And so it is an utter abdication of congress's constitutional duty to allow such a blatant violation of the constitution as the power of domestic spying with zero oversight. and yes I know that contemptibleness isn't really a word.

Slate's Daniel Gross spells out in detail why switching from group (employer) health care to individual would be a disaster.

They want to replace a bunch of giant, sophisticated consumers possessing limited bargaining power with a mass of unsophisticated consumers possessing no bargaining power. For some reason, they think you and I can do a better job negotiating with Oxford and Aetna than Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola can. ... The overwhelming majority of individuals lack the resources, time, and fortitude to confront well-funded, profit-obsessed bureaucracies. Nor do they have human resource staffs or outside consultants that can act as advocates.

pretty compelling reason to buy insurance in groups, whether it's by employer or another way.

optic: that immigration bill sure seems to have gone down in flames
optic: hurray
** lens what what **
chaircrusher: i wonder what would be a sane thing to do about immigration
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I'm sure everyone who voted for the Washington state smoking ban (or bans elsewhere) will appreciate this Slate news item:

New Zealand researchers proposed to ban smoking in cars when children are inside. Rationale: Even with the windows down, you get as much secondhand smoke in a car as in a smoky barâ”and the country already bans smoking in bars. Six months ago, Arkansas banned smoking in cars when a child is strapped into a car seat. Next: The legislator who spearheaded the Arkansas ban wants to ban smoking by pregnant women, since the womb is another place where a child can't escape a parent's smoke.

Yep, gotta protect the children.

Apparently, the facts are simple: telling kids not to use drugs makes kids use drugs. Seeing the ads seems to give kids the idea that more people are using them and that doing so is normal. The most effective approach is apparently to keep your mouth shut. I wonder if this applies to drinking, driving, drinking and driving, smoking, getting pregnant, and/or voting.

I run an email list (about synthesizers, but that's not important right now). this week, some guy more or less innocently remarked on the seemingly disproportionate number of Jewish people in the history of synthesizer design and production. predictably, this resulted in a flurry of "this is off-topic" type posts, accusations of some kind of -ism, and, eventually, someone being called a nazi (off list) for suggesting that the topic didn't belong on the list. run-of-the-mill stuff.

However, a few hours later, a gentleman with a Germanic name and a Swedish email address mailed me to explain that being called a nazi is a serious matter and an issue for the police, being a "serious accusation and crime in at least most of the European countries". He opined that, even though the serious accusation had occurred off-list, the list was still somehow "the medium" and he wanted to know what I planned to do about it.

Are these people insane?


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"Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, as the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, for the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals."

Some people would say that this has already essentially happened to us, and there's some truth to that. Certainly, there's a strain of popular culture that is basically inoffensive pablum. But that's always been woth us, and it hasn't taken over; I'd say it isn't even dominant. I think we've seen the opposite in the past ten years or so: entertainment (and other products) are increasingly niche-marketed; markets are fragmented, a version of everything for every conceivable taste and temperament. Each minor minor minority has its web sites and news sources and interest groups, and then can all carry on their self-contained lives independent of the others, except when they get in yelling matches with each other, or fight over things like TV ratings or political power. Between the extremes of blandly inoffensive and totally self-regarding lies an ideal of comity that we once, supposedly, enjoyed.

Here's a bit from Speer about the contrast between how the democracies prepared themselves for war and how authoritarian Germany, where the leaders secretly feared public insurrection, prepared:

In order to anticipate any discontent, more effort and money were expended on supplies of consumer goods, on military pensions or compensation to women for the loss of earnings by their men in the service, than in the countries with democratic governments. Whereas Churchill promised his people only blood, sweat, and tears, all we heard during the various phases and various crises of the war was Hitler's slogan: "The final victory is certain." This was a confession of political weakness. It betrayed great concern over a loss of popularity...

It reminds me of the days after 9/11, when many Americans began to think of ourselves, at least at times, as a country at war. And I think many people, at least a little, craved a sort of Churchillian call to sacrifice, as though an effort of blood, sweat, and tears were the only noble response to 9/11 and way to honor the victims. And I think a certain amount of dissatisfaction set in when there was no demands made on most of us at all, beyond standing in long airport lines for a few months.

Not to politicize this; I don't think that "no sacrifice required!" response is a bush or a republican thing. It's more the character of modern civilized life, that we think we deserve a world of at most minor inconvenience, where irritation is about as close as we get to the heights of classical greek tragedy. A catastrophe can of course shake us from that feeling occasionally, but never permanently.

I don't mean this to be a particularly politicized comment, but there are some ways in which I can't help seeing parallels between the Germany that fell under Hitler's influence and modern America, or modern western culture generally. Here's a quote, from the introduction to Speer's book:

In a time when nothing in the democratic process seemed to work, Hitler's words sounded a loud call to many young men who by 1931 were convinced of the necessity for bold, new remedies for Germany's deep troubles. The succession patched-up coalition governments that governed neither long nor well and could find no answers at all to Germany's economic depression, social unrest, and military powerlessness had to be replaced by a man and a party with new solutions, by a leader who knew the meaning of strength and law and order.

It's a veritable cliche to say that bad times and fear among the masses can lead to a dictatorship that promises wealth and security, but what struck me about this statement was less that aspect than the assertion that it was the perceived failure of democracy that opened the door. And who in our country who's at all interested in politics has not thought sometime in the past decade or so that democracy was having some serious problems?

I've long had a sort of distant and vague admiration for the Cato Institute, which I generally knew to be a libertarian think tank and, as think tanks go, not excessively partisan or intellectually dishonest. But I never paid too much attention to them specifically until they recently acquired a blog and started their Cato unbound series of essay-discussions. I've found a lot of their stuff refreshingly straightforward. They seem to feel free to be critical of the current administration and state of the Republican party without wasting time trying to score points like most critics from the left would. The current unbound discussion about whether small-government types have any future in the Republican party includes a number of examples of people mentioning both Republican and Democrat policies of the past or present critically or with praise, with no real regard to trying to score points for one side of the other. It's such a pleasure to just read a discussion based more or less on straight facts, theories, and interpretations that I don't really care whether I agree and am just interested in reading more.

Good Reason article on how modern Republican political strategy has turned them into a big-spending party.

Why should it be so much harder for today's one-party Republican government than for divided governments in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton years? The answer has to do with a critical shift in the Republicans' governing strategy, dating to the late 1990s. From 1981 through 1998, Republican reformers ... believed that, by cutting spending, Republicans could build prosperity, tame Big Government, and win majority status. The trouble was that budget cuts brought short-term political backlashes that kept interrupting the program. ... The new course was set by DeLay and Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political strategist -- both machine-builders par excellence. And so, under DeLay and Bush, the Republicans spent generously, even profusely, to build their base. ... When, last year, DeLay blurted out that the budget had no fat left, he meant that it had no political fat, and he was right. Every dollar now served a constituent group in DeLay's carefully built machine.

The New Republic has a seven-page opus this week on the roots of French anti-Americanism, and whether there is such a thing anyway. Here it is (free registration required, or use bugmenot). I wouldn't normally even try to persuade anyone to read a seven-page (and that's seven web pages, each multiple screens full) TNR opus reviewing several books and unifying the whole thing into a historical and contemporary tour de force, but it's really good. And, I think, to most Americans it will be a little surprising. I mean, to most of us, the French are sort of a running joke, a bit clownish, a bit malicious, but deep-down, we assume, it's more like the sparring of siblings than anything serious. But the point of the article and the books reviewed is that French anti-Americanism has deep roots, going back to colonial attitudes about the new world, and snobbery about its culture compared to that of Europe. Then there's the anti-semitism, which generally I try to ignore but lately has been giving me the willies. Anyway, if you read one vast online historical book review opus this week, this is the one.

Why progressives should support eliminating/replacing the mortgage interest deduction.

As Gene Steuerle and his co-authors at the Urban Institute have documented, more than 80 percent of the major tax incentives for housing go to the top 20 percent of Americans ...while less than 5 percent go to the bottom 60 percent. ... The commission proposes to scrap the mortgage-interest deduction and replace it with a "Home Credit" that allows families to reduce their taxes by 15 percent of mortgage interest on borrowing up to $227,000 to $412,000 (the limit is set at 125 percent of the median sales price for each county).

and so on.

She admitted, however, to a hankering for what will soon be the good old days. "I'd like there to be two or three underground places where I could still smoke."
"It's called your house or your car," interjected Smith, who had no idea she'd walked into the pro-law rally, as she put it.

From the PI. Nothing like a self-righteous health zealot.

My default policy in the election today was simple: when in doubt, vote against the initiative, vote against the incumbent, or vote against the Democrat (this city is pretty much entirely run by a good-ol-boy network of Democrats). I am not usually a big fan of the "throw the bums out!" approach to political decision-making, as it's usually a cynical ploy by perfectly well-connected insiders to differentiate themselves. However, I'm starting to feel that, by default, increased government activity is bad, and the way things are done is bad. I know money in politics is a perennial thing, going back at least to the Romans or the Greeks, but the influence of lobbying vs the "will of the people" seems especially high lately. And since the Republicans took over all three branches and became officially a big-spending party, there's no one in Washington interested in spending less or in keeping an eye on what other people are spending.

So I was idly thinking about how far you could get running for office on a NO! platform. Whatever comes up in congress, you promise to vote NO! New taxes? no. Tax cuts? no. Spending increases? no. Spending cuts? no. Going to war? no. Coming home from war? no. Roads, bridges, prescription drug plans, tariffs, subsidies, agencies? no, no, no, no, no, and no. The beauty of this is it avoids a lot of the dangers of government, most of which seem to come about from somebody deciding (usually inspired by a lobbyist) that we're not doing enough about something, and that the government should spend more money on it.

The problem of course is that there are some good things that you'd have to vote NO! on, to keep your promise. I suppose you could make the platform a little more complicated: NO! on everything except whatever shrinks government. e.g., spending cuts yes, ending wars yes, agency consolidation yes. Obviously, there are things we really do need, like an intelligence agency and an army and, like, stuff. The NO! party would probably not make a good ruling party. But as the opposition in a time of rampant crap? I think it's the only solution.

So, who wants to help me make buttons, t-shirts, and a web site, and who wants to run for congress next year?

I finally sat down with my voter information pamphlet last night and attempted to actually figure out what to vote for. Most of it is pretty bland, but there are some initiatives that I'm still mulling over. Feel free to make your arguments.

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