I’ll probably vote for Gael Tarleton, because I suspect Richard Pope will be an outlier on the commission and won’t be effective.

There’s a slim chance he might be right, but I’m going with Occam’s razor here. If Mark Greene was really about elections reform, he’d make sure to oppose computer balloting without a verifiable paper trail. He doesn’t. He’s just a crank.

I’ll be voting for Sherril Huff.

SJR 8206 – A constitutional amendment on the budget stabilization account maintained by the state treasury.

This amendment would require the legislature to transfer additional moneys to the budget stabilization account in each fiscal biennium in which the state has received extraordinary revenue growth, as defined, with certain limitations.

There are two ways to smooth out revenue fluctuations from year to year. One of them is to borrow from the future, which is what the federal government does. However, the state constitution requires a balanced budget and getting that changed isn’t politically doable. The other way is to put money away, to be drawn down when times are bad. That’s how Washington State currently does it. (Some states don’t do it at all.)

The rainy day fund is currently about $300 million. The revenue shortfall is about $2 billion. In other words, the rainy day fund turned out to not be large enough. Not even close.

This amendment requires that, if the state has growth that is more than 33% above the 10 year growth rate, the amount above that be put into the rainy day fund. In other words, don’t spend as much money when times are really flush and story it away. We currently save 1% of our revenues, and this won’t change that. It only adds additional saving for flush times.

The no argument is that we should spend that money on needed services instead. And while that is an attractive argument, we’d have to cut off those programs a few years later during the next recession. I’d rather us have sustainable programs.

And it’s much preferable to save the money than rebate taxes. That doesn’t prepare us at all for the next recession.

I’ll be voting for this amendment.

SJR 8205 – removes Article VI, Section 1A of the Washington Constitution.

This amendment would remove an inoperative provision from the state constitution regarding the length of time a voter must reside in Washington to vote for president and vice-president.

This one is pretty much a no-brainer. But before I explain why, here’s the provision which will be removed if this passes:

SECTION 1A VOTER QUALIFICATIONS FOR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS. In consideration of those citizens of the United States who become residents of the state of Washington during the year of a presidential election with the intention of making this state their permanent residence, this section is for the purpose of authorizing such persons who can meet all qualifications for voting as set forth in section 1 of this article, except for residence, to vote for presidential electors or for the office of President and Vice-President of the United States, as the case may be, but no other: Provided, That such persons have resided in the state at least sixty days immediately preceding the presidential election concerned. The legislature shall establish the time, manner and place for such persons to cast such presidential ballots.

Basically the deal is that at the time, the 60 day requirement was much more lenient than the normal residency requirement for voting in Washington. However, the Supreme Court invalidated all laws that establish a residency requirement that’s greater than 30 days for presidential elections. And now we just have a 30 day requirement anyway. So why not clean this provision up?

I’ll be voting for it. Even if it wasn’t inoperative, I’m in favor of making voting easier.

Initiative Measure No. 1183 concerns liquor: beer, wine, and spirits (hard liquor).

This measure would close state liquor stores and sell their assets; license private parties to sell and distribute spirits; set license fees based on sales; regulate licensees; and change regulation of wine distribution.

For the last few years, Costco has sponsored initiatives to privatize liquors sales and distribution. I’m generally in favor of the idea, but have opposed the specific measures in the past, and I oppose I-1183 as well. But it won’t break my heart if it passes either.

State Liquor Store, 1971

Right now beer and wine can be sold in private retail stores in Washington. Hard liquor is sold only from restaurants, bars, and retail stores run by the Washington State Liquor Control Board. I believe the hard liquor monopoly is a remnant of prohibition. I-1183 directs the state to sell any assets related to liquor sales or distribution. In practice this will mean that the stores will be closed, because another item in the measure limits sales to stores with 10,000 square feet. In other words, grocery stores and big box discount stores.

The measure does not eliminate the three tier system for distribution though; we’ll still have producers, distributors, and retailers. But some companies will be allowed to be their own distributors, bypassing the middle man. That means places like Costco can sell liquor more cheaply. Which is something I’d be fine with, but it will probably freeze out small producers from the largest sales channel in the state. Right now they have a better opening into the distribution system. I don’t know where I come down on that. I’d like small producers to survive, but I don’t agree with doing it by monopoly power and price fixing.

I-1183 will raise revenues for the state, from $5 million to $8 million in 2012, and $35 million to $42 million in 2017, depending on assumptions. Local government revenues increase as well. These are the numbers the state came up with. The No On 1183 campaign likes to portray this as a tax increase and therefore bad. People don’t have to buy hard liquor, so it doesn’t bother me much.

Where my opposition comes though is that liquor will more or less only be sold in grocery stores. My ideal privatization measure would sell off the stores to be operated privately. Or allow private companies to open competing liquor stores. But spreading liquor sales into groceries worries me.

So my vote is a weak no.

Pushing Wheelchair adapted from photo by bradleygee (CC By)

Initiative 1163 – concerning long-term care workers and services for elderly and disabled people.

This measure would reinstate background checks, training, and other requirements for long-term care workers and providers, if amended in 2011; and address financial accountability and administrative expenses of the long-term in-home care program.

Quick background that I know most of my friends know, but not everyone who stumbles on this will. I spent 3 years caring for my mother during her terminal illness and for my grandparents as their health declined before they died. I hired a number of people to help care for my mother. We did not use an agency for reasons that are not germane to this. There was no good way to determine the qualifications or experience for these caregivers, and it was a crapshoot with respect to the care they gave. For my grandmother, I insisted we use an agency that performed background checks at least, and they supposedly gave their workers some minimal training.

In 2008, I voted for an initiative that created a licensing program and training for long term caregivers. It passed by a large margin. Since then, the state legislature delayed some of the requirements instituted by that initiative. This was an attempt to save money given the horrible budget constraints the state experienced. Instead of starting in 2012, the program now starts in 2014.

If I could be sure this was a one-time delay, I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep. I wouldn’t like it, but we’d get the improvement in standards fairly shortly. However, given that we continue to have budget constraints, I fully expect the legislature to delay the start of the program again. I do not want it to be indefinitely delayed. If this initiative passes, the program starts in 2012, and the legislature can’t amend it for two years. By which time it will have started. It’s much harder to shut down an existing program than to delay one that hasn’t started.

I don’t care that it costs some money. In an ideal world, market forces would create a mechanism for ensuring care, but that hasn’t happened. The only way to ensure good long term care is to have a lot of money. People who are disabled or dying deserve a minimum level of care even if they are poor, and this initiative goes a long way to ensuring that.

I’ll be voting yes on I-1163.

Photo by Oran Viriyincy (CC By-Sa)

Initiative 1125 – Concerning state expenditures on transportation.

This measure would prohibit the use of motor vehicle fund revenue and vehicle toll revenue for non-transportation purposes, and require that road and bridge tolls be set by the legislature and be project-specific.

That’s the ballot title and question. Which, unfortunately, is pretty bland and misleading. There are a grab bag of provisions in the initiative, most of which are bad:

Right now the legislature authorizes tolling on specific roads or bridges, and the state transportation commission sets the actual toll rates. I-1125 requires that the legislature set the tolls. That’s a guarantee for a political clusterfuck. Need to raise tolls to pay to repave or for structural fixes? A group of eastern washington legislators can hold it up. It also means every individual toll decision is subject to referendum.

It requires that tolls be uniform. That’s to remove what’s called congestion pricing. Want to cut down on people using the 520 bridge during rush hour? Charge a higher toll during rush hour. This provision would prevent that.

But the real reason behind the initiative is to prevent using I-90 for light rail. If this passes, there is no light rail to Bellevue. The main person bankrolling the initiative is the owner of Bellevue Square and a major investor in car culture related projects.

One of the effects of the initiative, though not explicitly part of it, is that it reduces the bonding capability for the 520 bridge replacement, which has already started. So to finish the bridge, the WSDOT will need to cancel about $500 million worth of other projects and shift the money to 520.

Really, all a person needs to do is look at who is sponsoring the initiative: Tim Eyman. He had one good initiative (performance audits) and a shit-ton of crappy ones. Including this one.

I’m voting NO.

The Laffer Curve (courtesy of Lawrence Khoo)

The theory is based on the idea that if people are taxed at 100% of their income, they won’t work any more than required because they don’t see any additional benefit to their work. Because of that, tax revenue is $0. If you lower the tax rate, then people have some incentive, and tax revenue goes up significantly.

If not used properly, the logic leads to the absurd proposition that the government lowers the tax rate to 0%, then government revenue is maximized. This is obviously not true either. Where the tipping point is can’t be determined exactly, but the best current research puts the optimal (for government revenue) tax rate at somewhere between 60% and 80%. If tax rates are lower than that, lowering them even more results in less revenue to pay for government programs.

This argument was actually made and a big part of pushing through the Bush tax cuts in the early part of the last decade. If we cut our tax rate, we’ll actually have more tax revenue because it will spur the economy so much that people will be working hard and making so much more money that the taxes on that extra growth will make up for the money we would have gotten in higher taxes.

The argument didn’t hold water then, and it doesn’t now. That’s because effective tax rates were well on the left side of that curve, and are even more on the left side of it now. Sometimes in debates, Republicans put out scare figures that we have the highest taxes in the world. It’s just not true. The United States is a low tax country already. We’re not a tax haven, like the Grand Caymans, but taxes are pretty damn low.

As a share of GDP, we’re near the bottom of industrialized countries in total taxes:

General Government Receipts as a Share of GDP (chart from CBPP.org)

The taxes of the people subject to the highest tax rates are effectively very very low.

Effective federal tax rates on wealthy people (chart from CBPP.org)

Here’s the nominal tax rates the wealthiest pay. Even the highest rates that a person could pay on a part of their income are lower than at any time since the 1930s.

Top Marginal Tax Rates, 1916-2010 (graph from VisualizingEconomics.com)

I’m not arguing here that rich people don’t pay their fair share. That’s for another rant. The point of this is that those rates are way to the left of the peak of the Laffer Curve. Now there’s possibly an argument that rich people will spur more economic activity with the money than the government would, but I don’t think that’s proven.

The next time a Republican tells you taxes are too high, ask them some questions. Ask them to define too high. Ask them what the criteria are for too high. Ask them what the economic goal is for lowering taxes. Because it looks to me like our taxes are pretty lenient.

White House: Obama to lay out spending plan

Much will be revealed at midweek, when the House and Senate are expected to vote on a budget for the remainder of this fiscal year and Obama reveals his plan to reduce the deficit, in part by scaling back programs for seniors and the poor.

The A.P. item is based on an appearance by David Plouffe on Meet The Press this morning. David Plouffe is an advisor to the President, and his appearance is to grease the wheels for President Obama’s budget proposal later this week. The A.P. may be making a bit more of Plouffe’s words than ought to be taken. Here’s the relevant part:

Video:

Transcript:

So we’ve had a lot of savings in health care, we have to do more. So you’re going to have to look at Medicare and Medicaid and see what kind of savings you can get. First, squeezing them out of the system before you squeeze seniors. Secondly, on Social Security, what he said is that is not a driver right now of significant costs, but in the process of sitting down and talking about our spending and our programs, if there can be a discussion about how to strengthen Social Security in the future, he’s eager to have that discussion.

I really hope this doesn’t mean what the A.P. thinks it means. Sadly, they may be right.

The problem with the federal budget is actually really small right now, though it gets bigger down the road. You may have heard that the deficit is the largest it’s ever been. That’s only correct if inflation is not taken into account. A better measure is the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product, a figure that currently is about 10%. We ran a much bigger deficit during World War II, and we’re currently only running a deficit about twice as high as when Ronald Reagan was in office. ( I am not going to get into whether Bush or Obama is responsible for this level, but the answer is George W. Bush.)

US Deficit as a Percentage of GDP

Now, even that 10% of GDP may seem high because the U.S. has only exceeded that twice before, but we also have to consider interest rates. The Prime Rate was 15.25% when Reagan took office, and 8.75% when he left office. It got as high as 21.5% and dropped as low as 8% in 1987, but during the Reagan administration it was usually well above 10%. This rate was 7.25% when Obama took office, and now stands at 3.25%. That’s not what the government pays in interest, but it does show the general idea. The current cost to borrow money is less than half what it was at the lowest point during the Reagan administration. It is amazingly cheap to borrow money right now.

That’s why the current deficit is really not much of a problem.

Long term, we do have a problem with our deficits. No, not with Social Security. That actually doesn’t have an issue until the late 2030s, and will require a fairly small change to fix. Our long term problem is with Medicare and Medicaid. And the problem isn’t that we have too generous of benefits. The problem is that health care is too expensive in the U.S. Western Europe has much better health outcomes than we do, for about half the cost and much less hassle.

Health Care Costs as a percentage of GDP

If we paid the same as other developed countries, we wouldn’t have a long term deficit. The problem is that we’re spending recklessly. The problem is that we give too much money to doctors, insurance companies, drug companies, and the like. That’s why the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. RomneyCare or ObamaCare), even without a public option, was good for us. It has a number of controls that bring down costs. It doesn’t eliminate the problem, but it does remove a big chunk of our future deficit.

The Republicans introduced a budget plan last week that goes the wrong way. It repeals the A.C.A. and pretty much also eliminates Medicare and Medicaid. It eliminates the deficit long term by shifting health care costs to individuals. That would be fine, and in fact preferable, if health care costs were predictable for individuals. But they aren’t, so when you get sick, or A.L.S., you have to pay for everything yourself or hope that your insurance company will. Remember, health insurance companies make money by not insuring people with health problems.

The Republican plan, which thankfully doesn’t have a chance of passing in anything like it’s current form, has all sorts of problems that I may blog about later. But how it handles Medicare is its defining set of terms.

So now Barack Obama has agreed to find ways to save money in Medicare and Medicaid. The problem with that is that the only way to save money and not hurt individuals is to double down on the A.C.A. Introduce the public option or nationalize health care or the like. In other words, more not less socialized medicine. I’d be fine with that personally. But you know that hasn’t a chance of passing either. Obama loves compromise, and since the direction of compromise is the wrong direction on this issue, it means more health care costs will be shifted to individuals.

None of either of those plans (the Republican one or the possible Obama one) will affect health care costs overall. Just that born by the government. The Market works to control costs in many goods, but not health care. If it did, we wouldn’t have health care inflation outpacing regular inflation for the last 30 years. There’s many reasons for this, such as health insurance adverse selection, lack of bargaining power, inability to control health care needs, and more.

The upshot of all this is that it looks like we’re going to do something we don’t need to do right now, reduce the deficit, in a way that hurts everyone but the really rich and that doesn’t actually solve the underlying problem. We’ve got a center-right President moving rightward when he should be getting more progressive. And the Obama-istas wonder why the base that gave him the nomination in 2008 isn’t so thrilled with him. Sure he’s better than McCain would have been. But it’s hard to stay excited for someone who’s selling point is well, you could have that idiot over there.

I’ll probably write more about the budget compromise that was passed last week for 2011. It moved the wrong direction too.

[Staffan de Mistura, the top U.N. envoy in Afghanistan,] spoke in a somber tone as he described how three U.N. staff members and four Nepalese guards were killed Friday when the protesters stormed their compound in the normally peaceful city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He placed direct blame on those who burned a copy of the Muslim holy book in Gainesville, Florida, last month, stoking anti-foreign sentiment that already was on the rise after nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan.

President Hamid Karzai publicly condemned the March 20 Quran burning, leading some to blame him for triggering the protests. De Mistura, however, blamed the person who torched the holy book.

“Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of offending culture, religion or traditions,” de Mistura said. “Those who entered our building were actually furiously angry about the issue about the Quran. There was nothing political there.”

I beg to differ Mr. de Mistura, that’s exactly what freedom of speech is. It is the right to piss people off by opening my mouth. It is the right to gore sacred cows. It is legal sanction to disagree about anything. Every day I run across speech that pisses me off. Every day I run into speech that offends me. Some of it is religious. Listening to Oral Roberts, or Jimmy Swaggart, or any number of other preachers, dead and alive, offends me. People proclaiming that I must have a personal relationship with a great sky-father offends me greatly. Seeing people write screeds about hippy-dippy Chinese herbs curing cancer offends me. Some of it is political. I get pissed off every day listening to the lies that the Republican/Tea Party spews. It’s not just that I disagree. Listening to Glen Beck offends me. Seeing someone write about their admiration for Glen Beck makes me want to lock people up for our own good.

And I suck it up because that’s the price I pay for being able to say the opposite. If I get to say that science is true, then someone else gets to be an idiot. If I get to say that Glen Beck is an idiot, then he gets the right to deny reality and say he’s not an idiot. Even if I’m offended. Even if it pains me to know something is misfiring between people’s ears and there’s no known medical cure. I have to live with it. That’s exactly what freedom of speech is.

The cure for bad speech (however one defines it) is not closing it down, but speaking. Tell people the truth. Convince them. Get grand rallies of people who agree. Be angry! Stomp your feet! Burn people in effigy. Be offensive with your own speech if you want. I fully support the right of abortion protesters to hoist posters of bloody fetuses and for people to march with signs that say God Hates Fags!. Go for it! If someone else’s speech convinces people and mine doesn’t then either I have an incorrect position, or I am not a convincing speaker.

What isn’t a moral response to speech is to torch a building and kill people. Period.

The people who should be blamed for the killings are the people who torched and killed.

Honey with a Honey Bee Beard (CC By-Nd Writ3Click Fotos)

The pastor, the Rev. Terry Jones, had threatened to destroy a copy of Islam’s holy book last year but initially backed down. On Friday he said Islam and its followers, not his church’s burning of the Quran, were responsible for the killings.

And you sir, are an idiot. Just because you have the right to burn something that someone else considers sacred, doesn’t mean it’s not offensive. Common human decency means that I do not walk up to every Christian I meet and tell them they are an idiot for believing in fairy tales. I don’t wander the streets with signs proclaiming that blacks are drug users, because it’s wrong and offensive.

I still have a moral obligation to speak correctly. The law cannot and should not judge speech. Your god, or your sense of morality, should. If your god tells you that burning other god’s books will elevate your god, then perhaps you have an over-controlling thin-skinned god who’s about as worthless as your average Republican. Seriously, if I can take being contradicted in public, then your supposedly all-powerful god will survive it.

I still have a social obligation to speak civilly though sometimes civility can or should be abrogated in order to speak effectively. When a speaker crosses the line to disrespect, speakers ought not disclaim responsibility for the effects of that speech, when those effects were what the speaker was specifically trying to create. Deliberately offending people, then saying it’s their fault they were offended is douchebaggery. You have a part in this. Own up to it. You broke your social obligation, and perhaps it was necessary. Nevertheless, you are not an innocent bystander.

Responsibility is not an either/or proposition. Neither is responsibility a pie that gets cut into pieces and apportioned out. Both killers and speakers were links in the chain that resulted in a number of dead people. Mr. Jones is responsible for a piece in the chain from bad speech, and should be punished in the way that bad speech is punished, with more speech. Denouncements. Protests. Being attributed an idiot. The people who conducted the executions should be punished with prison because they killed. But all of them are responsible.