Category: Politics

Normally evil Joan Ryan wrote a remarkably sane column today on child support:

With a state budget deficit of $38 billion, it’s time for California to take a baseball bat to this dysfunctional support-payment system. It doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for years. If it continues as is, the report warned, the arrears debt will surpass $30 billion by 2010.

Unfortunately, her prescriptions, all of which have already been shot down by the legislature, merely nibble around the edges of the problem, which has two parts, one state and one federal. The state part is a statutory guideline that sets the amount of child support orders ridiculously high, and the federal part is a law (the Bradley Amendment) that forbids courts from reducing child support arrears in order to correct a mistake in a prior order.

The rest of it – including an amnesty program – is fluff.

Last weekend, some of the techtopians raised a flap over Starbucks’ fascist policy forbidding photography in their stores, encouraging readers to storm the barricades with their digital cameras to take back this commons, give power to the people and smash the state, so a lot of folks complied.

Now we have another case of photo-fascism involving another multinational symbol of capitalism and gross accumulations of personal wealth, and there’s an actual lawsuit at the heart of it.

Ken Adelman, founder of TGV (“Two Guys and a Vax”), is taking photographs of the California coast and archiving them to create a record that can used to prevent wanton destruction of the environment by nefarious forces. That’s a good thing, right, since we all love the environment, and we’re caring people, and the sea lions and otters are in trouble, etc. Only some billionaire with a palatial estate is suing Adelman to take down the pictures of their estate, throwing a monkey-wrench into the whole project, and it’s big news – the lead story in today’s Mercury News.

But the folks who normally complain about free speech restrictions that prevent them from pirating music and photographing Starbucks customers are silent on the story.

Perhaps that’s because the litigious billionaire is Barbra Streisand, Democratic Party activist and faux environmentalist.

UPDATE: Fox News covered the Streisand anti-enviro lawsuit as a “Below the Fold” item today, affirming their good taste in wacky news items.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jeff Licquia points out that free music blog Boing-Boing was shamed into giving this story some air time circa Sunday, and Mark Buehner muses about the media reaction if the palatial estate in question were owned by Charlton Heston. No jive.

Krugman’s on the rampage against the tax cut, and he’s got the Financial Times on his side. He claims we were getting a great deal on taxes already:

Once the new round of cuts takes effect, federal taxes will be lower than their average during the Eisenhower administration. How, then, can the government pay for Medicare and Medicaid — which didn’t exist in the 1950’s — and Social Security, which will become far more expensive as the population ages? (Defense spending has fallen compared with the economy, but not that much, and it’s on the rise again.)

Gee, in how many ways is that deceptive? Here’s a few:

Federal income taxes don’t pay for social security, social security taxes do, and they were up to 6.8% of GDP in 2002 from 2% in 1955.

During the Eisenhower Administration, we were still paying for WW II, a real war that took longer than 3 weeks to win.

Individual federal income taxes averaged 7.7% of GDP during Eisenhower, and they were 8.3% in 2002. After this tax cut, they’ll still be higher than they were during Eisenhower.

The big growth in taxation since the ’50s has been at the state level – rising from 5% of GDP in 1947 to 9.6% today.

States are in trouble, and many will need to raise taxes soon, which will more than gobble up the latest round of federal tax cuts.

Percentage of GDP isn’t the best way to measure tax load, because of the effect that capital gains – not a part of the GDP – have on tax receipts. The highest level of taxes as a percentage of GDP was 10.3% in 2000, higher even than in 1944.

Before WW II, federal income taxes were below 1% of GDP, so we’re at very high levels historically. This is all on account of the concentration of power in Washington made possible by the New Deal and some creative work by the Supreme Court since the 1930s.

Generally speaking, I’d rather that Sacramento spend my tax dollars than Washington. That’s not because I like the ruling party there better, it’s because it’s closer to home and more accountable; it’s also consistent with federalism. Some would rather that Washington spend them; but who wants to pay rising taxes at both the state and federal levels?

I don’t.

Source: Congressional Research Service report.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, back in the real world, the California Legislature is preparing to raise taxes on income, sales, tobacco, and cars:

…the Davis budget proposal also includes a half-cent sales tax increase to repay the deficit bonds along with increases on cigarette taxes and income taxes for individuals earning more than $150,000 and couples whose combined salaries exceed $300,000.

This doesn’t strike me as highly credible, but you can make up your own mind:

THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber.

Perhaps there are plans for military tribunals, some of which could result in death penalties, but there’s an obvious attempt at sensationalism here.

I’ve been meaning to comment on the tax cut question, and this observation by Dan Gillmor and Molly Ivins is a good-enough foil:

The national Republican party isn’t this bad, but it’s getting there. The tax bills they’ve passed, for example, insult common sense, and push a dagger into what was left of fiscal responsibility.

It’s common sense that any tax cut is going to favor the wealthy, since they pay more taxes to begin with, right? And if you’re looking to stimulate the economy, which common sense says we should want in the time when 8.3% of Silicon Valley is unemployed and rallying for solutions and interest rates have already been cut, cutting taxes to put more investment dollars in play seems like a pretty common sense move, right? And if you’re concerned about budget deficits at the state level and the inability of government to fund education adequately, it’s common sense to reduce the federal bite in order to make more money available to the authority that actually funds public education, the states, right? So what’s the problem with cutting federal taxes?

Tax cuts are a problem because they benefit those who don’t need help, while failing to directly help those who need free health care, longer and better unemployment benefits, free broadband, and what-have-you. So the proposal is to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for all these great programs.

Only we tried that and it doesn’t work. California is the state with the biggest deficit, and it’s also the state with the most progressive tax system, that is, the one where the wealthy pay the largest share of the overall state tax burden. And the one thing we can learn from following California’s budget history is that the state never collects the correct amount of taxes: some years we collect way too little to support all the programs, which leads to crisis, and in other years we collect way too much, which leads to spending like drunken sailors.

This is because the incomes of the wealthy are more sensitive to fluctuations in the economy than the incomes of the working- and middle-class are. And just as inequitable taxation is an injustice that can’t be ignored, unpredictable taxation is an abomination that stands firmly in the way of responsible government.

There’s also something wrong with a state of affairs where half the people view the state as a burden that prevents them from supporting their families while the other half views it as slot machine that spits out free money on every pull of the crank. People should view government as a mutual benefit society that we all support because it works for all of us, not just the upper half and not just the bottom half. The present state of affairs is undemocratic.

Texas doesn’t want to follow California down the road of boom-or-bust taxation, and that’s certainly a laudable, common sense goal. Tax policy has to strike a balance between equity and predictability, and that’s not class warfare, it’s common sense. But Steve Peace’s wishes to the contrary, the California legislature shows no signs of willingness to correct the structural problems behind our current budget disaster, which would involve rewriting Prop 13 and flattening the tax curve. There’s a bi-partisan conspiracy at work to maintain the status quo.

Ivins also ridicules the DeLay redistricting plan in Texas by taking it out of context. Most Texans are Republicans these days – 57% moved Reep in the last Congressional election – but most of their Congressional delegation is Democrat – 17 to 15. This is because Martin Frost devised a redistricting plan in 1990 that gerrymandered the state like crazy for the Dems, who then held a majority in the legislature. Houses were split in 2000, so the courts had to issue redistricting, and they stuck with the Frost plan with minimal changes. So this isn’t fair, but Ivins doesn’t want you to know that.

Now why shouldn’t a state with Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature have a Republican majority in its Congressional delegation? It’s common sense that they should, and that’s exactly what DeLay and his fellow Texans in the majority want. The anti-Democratic Texas Dems have a different idea, and we certainly don’t want that sentiment creeping across the whole nation, to the detriment of our democracy.

Dan Weintraub, one of the Sac Bee political columnists, has a blog, and it’s not bad. He’s not Dan Walters, but he’s not chopped liver either.

Texas Dems are on the lam to stop a fair redistricting plan, and US Senate Dems use filibuster to block court appointments that have majority support.

Taken together, these moves represent a reliance on anti-democratic means of advancing an agenda with which the majority clearly does not agree. So they’re now the Anti-Democratic Party, nothing more and nothing less.

Commenting on the Totten piece that went from blog musing to WSJ Op-Ed, Sarge points out the salutary effects of the often-maligned US intervention in Latin America:

…despite all the issues the left has with the “Contras” it was because of their pressure that Nicaragua today is a Constitutional Republic. In all of Latin America, there is only one remaining dictatorship, that favorite of the left, Cuba. All the others became Democratic as a direct result of policies set in motion against the will (and, in some instances, the law) of the Liberal establishment.

So yes, there was a great deal of hand-wringing at the time over the Contras and the Allende business in Chile, but seen in the grand historical context, the US did push Latin America toward liberal democracy. In other words, we won the Cold War, and that’s been good for the whole world, even if some of the battles were messy. But that’s war, isn’t it?

Via Instapundit and Talk Left, an article by Rich Lowry on a bill designed to curb prison rape:

An often-cited estimate is that 22 percent to 25 percent of prisoners a year experience sexual pressuring, attempted sexual assault or completed rapes, while one in 10 of the nation’s 2 million prisoners suffer a completed rape. Given the gaps in reporting, most experts consider these numbers conservative.

How could anybody oppose this bill? Ask the California prison guards’ union why they’ve opposed similar measures at the state level and you’ll find that the guards use rape as a tool to intimidate prisoners (half of whom are in the Big House for drug violations, incidentally):

Invesitigating the “booty bandit” of Corcoran State Prison in which five guards are currently under indictment for setting up rapes of prisoners, two Los Angeles Times reporters uncovered the reason the state has not only ignored but covered-up many charges of brutality committed or condoned by guards in a number of California prisons including Frontera and Pelican Bay especially over the past decade.

Since 1989, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association — perhaps the most powerful union in the state — contributed nearly $1 million to the campaigns for office of Gov. Pete Wilson and Attorney Gen. Dan Lungren. Because of this exposure only months ago, Lungren began aggressively prosecuting the Corcoran guards and in response, the C.C.P.O.A. switched their endorsement to Gray Davis for governor. And . . . about this time, the San Francisco Examiner charged Lungren with being soft on white collar crime.

Does it make sense now?

In every session of the California Legislature there’s an effort to rein in rampant lawsuit abuse by the trial lawyers as well as an effort to simply make it more profitable. Dan Walters chronicles the latest installment:

The state Assembly’s dominant Democrats had a choice Thursday: help the thousands of small-business owners who have been clobbered by extortionate lawsuits or lawsuit threats under the state’s broad unfair competition law, or stand with personal injury attorneys who are among the Democrats’ most reliable campaign contributors.

The attorneys, to the utter surprise of no one, emerged as victors in a showdown hearing of the Assembly Judiciary Committee.

This was an especially grim reminder of the sentiments of Judiciary Committee chair Ellen Corbett, one of the least-principled members of the body.