Category: America

Should Massachussetts abolish the state income tax?

The endgame of the 2008 election season is interesting in a few ways. First, I find it interesting that Obama’s numbers go way up after people get to see him in action (e.g. during debates), and start to edge back down when robocalls and other personal attacks start to hit. In particular, it’s interesting to compare the projected electoral map from the beginning of the week to today, when Florida becomes a toss-up state again, as well as seeing the effect of ebbing Obama support in West Virginia and New Hampshire (and a gain in South Dakota).

But of more interest to me at the moment is a local question: what if Massachusetts abolished its state income tax? What’s interesting to me is not the question itself, which as I wrote yesterday is an idiotic response to crisis (and the New York Times agrees), but rather how loud the voices are about the question. The question isn’t drawing the same urgent public outcry as the effort to get the legislature to put marriage to a referendum, but it’s a pretty loud outcry nonetheless. And it makes me wonder: what’s really going on? Does being a social conservative in a state like Massachussetts just get more and more frustrating until one feels compelled to hold the recipients of critical government services hostage to get one’s demands met? I sometimes think that if I were conservative here, I’d feel effectively disenfranchised and thus would be inclined to grand gestures.

Nevertheless, there are quite a few people I’ve heard from who think it would be a good idea because it would make the legislature “pay attention” to their concerns about waste. To which I reply: there are more constructive ways to pay attention, and more constructive ways to reform. Specifically, I urge anyone who’s thinking about voting Yes on Question 1 to try making the cuts yourself first, with the Boston Globe’s Massachusetts Budget Game Calculator. The brilliant thing that you learn as you go through the budget item by item is just how limited the options are, and just how many challenges are in your way.

And there are challenges, because the budget is non-linear. Reducing spending in some areas leads to reduced state revenue and federal grants, making the job that much harder. Here’s an example: cutting 25% from the $32.2 billion state budget across the board (a chainsaw of a budget cut, if you will) nominally removes $8 billion in expenditures but only closes the budget gap by $4.9 billion, thanks to losses in federal funds and inability to get revenue. In fact, even a 50% cut across the board still leaves a $2.5 billion deficit.

The irony is that we’re already seeing big cuts in state government, thanks to the market meltdown, and we’ll see more. So even with a nationwide progressive sweep on November 4th (and that’s an unlikely scenario), the state is going to have to be fiscally conservative to make it through the coming recession. And that’s without a yes vote on tax abolition. Proponents of the abolition of the tax claim it will make the state a more attractive place to live and work, but the massive hatchet of Question 1 could ruin us.

Follow-up: Intrade confirms artificial inflation of McCain trading

I don’t know if Erik‘s seen this, but I found this report on Talking Points Memo interesting. Apparently Intrade’s internal investigation confirms that someone is artificially inflating the value of McCain (that is, the probability that he’ll win in November) by dumping huge amounts of money into the market in an irrational fashion. The CQ article says that it’s a single “institutional” member of Intrade and that they’ve been in contact with the investor, but that there’s no evidence that the rules of the exchange were violated.

I guess what this proves is that:

  1. Intrade is small enough to be manipulated, if you have a little spare change, and therefore its predictions aren’t trustworthy. Double-check any important prodictions with the Iowa Electronic Market and Betfair.
  2. There are McCain supporters out there who are willing to spend, and lose, large amounts of money to influence an outlying marker of the campaign’s success.

Unfortunate camera-mugging

Thanks to John Gruber for pointing to Austrian coverage of last night’s debate, complete with this bizarre picture of McCain. I think the caption says that he was reacting after he mistakenly turned the wrong direction to shake hands with the moderator. But there couldn’t be a worse image to sum up his debate performance last night:

Voter registration vs. voter suppression

What does it say about our politics that one party regularly tries to engage new voters and the other regularly tries to suppress them? If you believe the complaints from the GOP, they’re just trying to stave off widespread vote fraud. But study after study has shown that there is no widespread vote fraud conspiracy, which surely the Republicans know full well. Salon’s article Behind the GOP’s voter fraud hysteria covers some of the studies, including the fact that from 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud, 20 were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once, while the GOP worked to ensure that thousands more were disenfranchised.

And that’s really what the voter fraud suppression efforts are about: disenfranchisement on a massive scale.

Hey, Republicans: how about you go out and register your own voters rather than suppressing newly registered ones?

Nasty moments in Presidential debates

The commentariat are going to love this moment, because it sums up some things that the conventional wisdom has been saying about McCain — cranky, really angry, hotheaded — and surfaces some new memes. Like disrespectful. Like borderline racist. Like, can’t believe he’s losing to this guy.

I think this is McCain’s “heavy sigh” moment.

YouTube – McCain Calls Obama “That One”.

What are they betting on?

My friend and undergrad classmate Erik Simpson has been following an interesting trend on Intrade, the prediction market that allows predictive “bets” on realworld events. Specifically, Intrade’s prediction results were diverging from other predictive models, specifically those of fivethirtyeight.com. More research dug up the interesting fact that Intrade doesn’t agree with other predictive markets either. Yesterday Erik followed up these posts with the logical question: why not simply arbitrage the difference? If Intrade and the Iowa Electronic Markets are really efficient markets, there should be no persistent price spread, but since there is a price spread there’s an opportunity to make risk free money by selling on IEM and buying on Intrade, then reversing the trades after the election, when the outcome is locked. (As of this writing, Intrade has a 70% probability of Obama winning, vs. a 74.9% chance on IEM.)

The persistent difference in value can be explained by one of two market frictions: either there are one or more irrational actors who are making trades based on something other than rational economic decisions, or there is information asymmetry: the trader knows something that we don’t about the outcome of the election. I’m inclined to think it’s the former. But I don’t rule out the latter, for the reason that the GOP and its followers are starting to scare the hell out of me (anyone else wonder why someone shouting “Kill him” at a GOP rally wasn’t immediately brought in for questioning by the Secret Service?).

It’s not hard to see why the GOP might be frustrated at this point. The Democrats have done a superb job of keeping their powder dry, waiting until McCain really stepped up the smears to point out that he has deep roots in banking and real estate corruption through his membership in the Keating Five. This campaign has refused to roll over and play dead while smears and attacks were directed at them, and while they’ve played hard in return, it’s been to point out how McCain and Palin have specific unsuitabilities to deal with the issues in front of the country right now.

The downside of this campaign–one of the few really well contested matches we’ve seen in recent years–is that it doesn’t leave much room for discourse on the issues. I’d love to see Obama clear enough of the smoke to start talking about how we get out of this mess, but I think he’s going to be facing enough crap for the next few weeks that we won’t hear substantive proposals for a while.

VP debate, the morning after

I livetweeted the debate last night (start, end) and was reminded of a few things in the process. First, writing about anything as it happens means you’re paying much closer attention to what’s said. I got more of a substantive understanding of Biden and Palin’s positions, a closer awareness of both of their stumbles and gaffes, and a much deeper engagement in the process than if I had simply been watching it.

Aside: why did I ever try to do liveblogging before there was Twitter? Even if each post is 140 characters or less, it’s still a superior user experience to a heavyweight blogging CMS.

Now, the downside of liveblogging the debate. I didn’t have my eyes on the TV very much and so missed some of the nuances–I had to see someone else’s tweet to realize that Joe Biden spent much of his time looking at the moderator rather than the camera when he answered his questions, for instance. And I think that there was a downside to paying such close attention to individual exchanges, namely: I came away without a feeling about how the debate had played overall. Oh sure, I thought Joe took it on substance, but as I tweeted late last night, I’m not 100% sure that’s what matters to the American undecided voter. And I can certainly see a scenario (reinforced by the GOP spin from last night) where Palin and McCain get a bounce because her performance wasn’t a miserable failure and because she came across as a folksy, relatively human person.

I kind of hope, though, that we don’t hear any more “maverick” after last night.

Update: Doc has the same concerns about the debate performances that I did. That doesn’t mean, btw, that I think that focusing on personality is right; just that the pragmatic view is to ask how well each debater played in Peoria.

Keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times…

…because something tells me this race is going to be a rollercoaster for the next few weeks.

Screenshot below from the excellent Election ’08 iPhone App, from Pollster.com and Slate. For a more nuanced view, look to the fine folks at Electoral-Vote.com, which shows Obama’s lead 338 to 185 electoral votes, with 15 ties. This high margin is pretty new in the race–back in early September, the lead was only about 100 electoral votes.

For more context, check out the historical trends on Electoral-Vote.com, where you can see what happens if you don’t count the states with a less than 5% margin of victory (answer: we don’t have a clear winner yet).

Instant karma

There are some moments of karma that are just too good not to post. This is one of them: GOP delegate’s hotel tryst goes bad when he wakes up with $120,000 missing. An attendee of the RNC convention who argued that the US should “bomb the hell” out of Iran and seize its resources to pay for the invasion picks up a woman in the hotel bar, who … makes him drinks, gets him bombed, and seizes his resources:

In an interview filmed the afternoon of Sept. 3 and posted on the Web site LinkTV.org, Schwartz was candid about how he envisioned change under a McCain presidency.

“Less taxes and more war,” he said, smiling. He said the U.S. should “bomb the hell” out of Iran because the country threatens Israel.

Asked by the interviewer how America would pay for a military confrontation with Iran, he said the U.S. should take the country’s resources.

“We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money,” he said. “We deserve reimbursement.”

A few hours after the interview, an unknown woman helped herself to Schwartz’s resources.

Heh.

Via.

Meta campaigning: what to do when the other guy won’t talk straight

American representative democracy is based on some non-intuitive principles–that we the people should care enough about how we are governed that we develop an informed opinion on it, that power is best when dispersed and checked–and on some non-obvious assumptions. The one assumption that is absolutely key is that the people will have access to enough information on the candidates to make an informed decision.

This election is testing that assumption. With one side, we had a bitterly fought primary that lasted almost eighteen months and went right down to the wire, a candidate who has written two books and multiple detailed position papers about his views and policy proposals, who has said all along that he wanted to get above politics as usual to address core issues. On the other side, we have a ticket that has played fast and loose with the truth about themselves, particularly about Palin, and about their opponent. In this environment, there’s information asymmetry and the voter loses.

So how do you get back to the point where a balanced and fair exchange of views is possible? Well, maybe you run an ad that calls the other candidate on the lies he’s been telling, and you do it by summing up all the independent press coverage across the political spectrum that’s been written about it. An ad something like this:

Will it move the base, who are hoping against hope that McCain and Palin, against all odds, will actually embody the small government principles they want to see in Washington? I don’t know. I just hope it moves some independent voters. But I’m happy to see the campaign going on the attack about this.

Number Three on Flight Eleven

The anniversary of that day always is touchy for me, even seven years in, and society-wide we seem to have a certain ambivalence about the observation. We have public dedications of memorials and moments of silence, but the moments of silence are filled with business as usual and we see the dedications on TV as we go about our daily activities. But our lives are changed nonetheless–by the friend who lost a husband, by the loss of security we all share, by the massive gravitational pull of that awful day that irrevocably altered our trajectory as a nation toward preemptive war and devaluation of civil liberties.

I wasn’t planning to write an observance at all, actually. As I wrote in 2003, I prefer to let others do the remembrance, while I “do my part by asking questions about actions taken in the names of the fallen that I believe do them no honor.” Being a citizen is still the best way, in my opinion, to honor the dead and fight those who led the attacks.

Which leads me to the reason I am writing: Steinski’s sound collage “Number Three on Flight Eleven.” A previously unreleased track collected this year on the veteran mix artist’s retrospective “What Does It All Mean?”, it takes the recorded phone call of American Airlines flight attendant Betty Ong from on board Flight 11 and sets it sparingly above an almost subliminally ominous drone and beat, and in counterpoint to another speaking voice reciting lyrics by Paul Opperman from the Silos’ “When the Telephone Rings” and poems by Basho. It’s an unsettling, frightening track and I can’t listen to it more than once in a blue moon. And yet, there’s something in the end that carries a note of redemption: a repeating coda, the voice of the American Airlines call center reassuring Betty Ong, who’s holding on the line communicating the last moments aboard the hijacked plane, repeating “Yes. We’re still here.”

We’re still here.

As John Irving, another student of violence, would have put it in The Hotel New Hampshire, the real question in this violent crime is: did they get the us in us? Did the attack violate us so deeply that it touched our core and twisted who we were? Or are we still here?

I can’t find the link, but recently read a piece by someone who was in New York when the attacks happened but didn’t own a television. When he tried to describe to people outside New York what was going on–that  people seemed to be bearing up and keeping a stiff upper lip–based on what he observed in the streets, they didn’t believe him, because everyone else was scarred from watching the wounding coverage on TV over and over again. We were, in his assessment, traumatized as a nation by watching the attack so closely, and we need to acknowledge that to move on.

Yes. We’re still here.

Keeping on top of things

Our weekly moment of reflection, courtesy Harpers:

The Treasury Department seized control of mortgage and loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, firing the companies’ chief executives and promising to provide as much as $200 billion to prevent insolvency. The jobless rate rose from 5.7 percent to a five-year high of 6.1 percent, with more than 84,000 jobs lost in August, and Senator John McCain accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency. “This campaign is not about issues,” said McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

Yes. Heaven knows we wouldn’t want to make the election about issues. Like the mortgage crisis or the jobless rate. Good to see the McCain campaign has its finger on the pulse.

Vote suppression, accidentally or on purpose

NYTimes: Voter Registration by Students Raises Cloud of Consequences – NYTimes.com. See also Cavalier Daily, Voter registration code raises concerns (temporarily dead link, use the PDF version). Brief version: two bulletins from the registrar of elections for Montgomery County in Virginia advised students, incorrectly, that registering to vote in Virginia could cost them scholarship money, insurance coverage, and could cost their parents through loss of dependent status.

Bureaucratic foulup, or deliberate suppression?

One would think that the registrar of elections would be interested in facilitating voter turnout.

There’s a little bit of a blog kerfluffle about this right now–seems Jon Taplin reported it as a Republican suppression effort, but there’s no evidence that the registrar, Randall Wertz, is partisan. But the sort of consequences for registering to vote are pretty typical vote-suppression claims, and Wertz seems proud of the eight students who called to withdraw their applications.

So it could go either way, but it seems to me that we should be encouraging Montgomery County to register more students.