It’s June, that time of year when a Californian voter’s thoughts turn to ballot initiatives. This year we’ve got four items up for some direct democracy, propositions 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17.

Prop 13

No, not that Prop 13. This one seeks to change what amounts to an oversight that discourages landowners from performing seismic retrofits on some older buildings. Major renovations can cause a property to be reassessed at its current market value instead of whatever it was originally purchased for, which can deal a substantial hit to one’s bottom line. I’m in favor of seismic retrofits, and it looks like there’s no Trojan Horse going on here. I don’t know of anybody that’s seriously opposed to this one.

Prop 14

Open primaries. There’s a loaded phrase among the politically-enthusiastic. Proposition 14 seeks to allow all voters to weigh in on all candidates during the primaries, regardless of registered party affiliation. I’ve been against private clubs holding their little selection lotteries at public expense for a while now; I’m registered as an independent, so for years my primary ballots were mighty thin. The top two vote-getters would proceed to the November ballot.

There has been a bit of a fuss over this. We’ve got some very entrenched districts in the Golden State. There are areas where the Democratic candidate may as well not bother putting himself on the ballot; he’ll lose. In other areas, the Republican candidate faces the same sorry state of affairs. With only registered Democrats getting to vote for their party candidate and only registered Republicans getting to vote for theirs, we end up with candidates targeting very narrow demographics with their campaigns. In Orange County if you can get about 13% of the population to vote you in as the Republican candidate, it’s smooth sailing from there. This leads to some fairly extreme candidates from both parties.

The argument against Prop 14 comes in a couple of flavors: third parties will be shoved off the November ballot, the two richest candidates will go on to the general election, taxes will go up because we won’t have a minority army of Howard Jarvis‘s brainwashed sex slaves in Sacramento. Ok, that last was an exaggeration. To these I answer:

• Minor parties don’t win general elections in California under the current system. By letting everybody vote, folks like the Peace & Freedom, Greens, and Libertarians have a greater chance of getting a toehold if they can field a strong candidate.
• Right now, in most districts, the two richest candidates are from the same party and they duke it out in June only to coast through November in their comfortably-gerrymandered districts. Now they’ll get to square off in a bigger field. We’ll see how that works out.
• Oh no, we run the horrible risk of some reasonably-moderate Democrats coming out of the Bay Area and some reasonably-moderate Republicans coming out of the Central Valley and Orange County. This could lead to reasonable policies and and functional state government. We run the terrible risk of getting our money’s worth for our taxes.

For those concerned that this may have a disproportionate impact for one major party over the other, please note that both cadem.org and cagop.org urge a “no” vote on this. I’m strongly inclined to vote yes on Proposition 14.

Prop 15

Proposition 15 seeks to establish public funding of some elected positions. This would be your standard “get the money out of politics” populist push. The affected positions would be:

• California Secretary of State

and that’s it. Just the Secretary of State. As somebody that’s been a consistent participant in every general, primary, and special election since I turned 18, I find this to be ludicrous. Nobody’s buying the position of Secretary of State. There aren’t huge media wars over this elected position. I’d wager that most voters in California couldn’t describe a single job function of Secretary of State if you asked them on the way out of their polling places. I understand that this is meant to be some kind of a test-bed incremental approach to eventually divorcing special interest money from California politics, but applying it to a single position like this is half-assed, piss-ant, and not something I’m interested in supporting.

Prop 16

Proposition 16 seeks to address the problem of local governments taking over the electrical utilities, taking them from heavily-regulated bastions of free market economics to oppressive monoliths of socialist bureaucracy. Alas, this is a problem that isn’t really happening. Your city and county are broke. They aren’t going to buy out the electrical utility, and even if they do is that such a terrible thing? This proposition places a higher standard of public approval on starting a local utility than passing a constitutional amendment (still only 50% of the popular vote +1 in California).

Back in 2001 we had some Enron shenanigans, rolling brownouts in California, and a general failure of a regulated free market to deliver utilities to the people of this state. I know of a single municipal electric utility nearby: Healdsburg. They have lower rates than PG&E offers here in Santa Rosa, and had no brownouts. This proposition gives me the opportunity to require a public referendum (with a 2/3rd majority requirement) to get more reliable service for less. I see no good reason to vote yes on this.

Prop 17

Proposition 17 is like Prop 16 but with a potential for real impact on individuals. Mercury Insurance has run into some problems with California regulations that allow auto insurance providers to provide customer loyalty discounts but don’t allow competing companies to match a consumer’s existing loyalty discount. This means that if you’ve been with All State for ten years and want to shop around for better rates, All State gets a regulatory advantage to try to keep you.

To fight this, Mercury wants to be able to provide discounts based on continuity of coverage. If you’ve been with All State for five years, then switch to Geico for five more years, then seek to switch over to Mercury, you’d be eligible for the same discount as if you’d just stayed with All State that whole time. If you let your coverage lapse, the discount wouldn’t be available to you any more (it wouldn’t have been to start with, but this is the main rebuttal I’ve seen). Proposition 17 ostensibly opens up the auto insurance market to more aggressive competition between companies.

The catch here is that nothing changes about the regulations regarding the overall account balances of auto insurance companies. If a company gives away $10 million in discounts to one group of customers, they have to make up for that somewhere else on their books; that is to say they have to raise rates elsewhere to the tune of $10 million. In this case, any savings realized by the consistently-insured would be paid for by new drivers (with no insurance history) or those who have let their coverage lapse.

There’s an easy argument to be made that jerks driving around uninsured don’t deserve good rates after putting the rest of us at an increased risk. There’s also an easy heartstrings-pulling argument to be made that some people go without need of auto insurance for reasons outside their control. Maybe somebody’s job puts him in a position where he doesn’t need his own vehicle for a prolonged period. Maybe it’s a military deployment. Upon returning there has been a lapse in coverage, and our noble war hero is stuck with an inflated insurance bill.

This proposition has been largely funded by an insurance company looking to make a specific maneuver in the market, much like how Prop 16 is basically PG&E’s attempt to protect its monopoly. Prop 17, however, addresses a situation I actually see as affecting how Californians are getting by. This isn’t a theoretical bungled takeover by city or county bureaucrats; it’s a way that I might be able to shift a few bucks of insurance burden off to another demographic.

A lot of liberals, progressives, hippies, and Democrats have been complaining about obstructionist tactics by the Republicans since President Obama took office. On the radio I keep hearing demands that the Democrats take a page out of the old Republican majority playbook and deploy the “Nuclear Option” (aka the “Constitutional Option” to use the Republican terminology of the time). I thought that was a bad idea when the R’s were pushing it, and I still think it’s a bad idea when the D’s are being pushed by their base to use it.

The filibuster allows for a state with a small congressional delegation to stand firm in the face of a narrow majority on issues that are of great importance. If a senator strongly feels that the country, his constituents, or his principles are put at risk, he can force an issue to be tabled until a supermajority can shut him up via cloture or his objections can be addressed. This is a good thing.

How filibusters are used currently, however is not. The barest threat of objection now leads to cloture votes, nominations being set aside indefinitely, all at basically no cost to the obstructionist senator. Please note that I don’t think “obstructionist” is a bad thing in itself. There have been lots of bad laws passed and bad appointees approved for lack of vigorous and reasonable obstruction. It is currently possible for a senator to obstruct a bill without any appreciable effort or expenditure of political capital. That’s what needs to change. If a senator really wants to stop a bill or appointment, the rest of the senate should require that he stick his neck out a bit.

A couple of ideas that attempt to balance the value of the filibuster and other delaying tactics with the problems involved in its overuse:

• Bills and appointments should only be remanded to committee or otherwise tabled once introduced by a supermajority of senators present or on a simple majority upon a failed cloture motion. This would force a senator to stop the business of the Senate as a whole in order to stop a bill. It would probably cause more cloture votes, but less actual delay.
• Should a senator object to considering a bill or amendment “as read” (this currently forces the clerk to read the entire bill aloud, which can be quite onerous with long legal documents), then the objecting senator is responsible for reading the bill himself. He may share the burden with other senators that volunteer to do so, but may not physically leave the Senate chamber during the reading. Should the objecting senator leave the chamber for any reason, the bill will be considered “as read” for procedural purposes. If the senator actually has not read the bill, he can damn well read it himself.
• All requests to delay committee votes or meetings must be publicly associated with the delaying senator. Frequently there are legitimate reasons for committees to not immediately take up an item; there may be reports demanded of various agencies, experts or witnesses to be scheduled for questioning and exposition, and so forth. Anonymous holds on whole swaths of issues need to stop.

None of these measures would stop the filibuster or unduly infringe on the rights and responsibilities of the individual senators to do right by their constituents, but each attaches a risk or burden in doing so.

California’s budget is a mess, and has been since the big dot-com bubble burst. This is nothing new, and has been a political campaign topic at the state level for about ten years now. I don’t post about it much, but somehow every time KC Meesha gretches about his taxes, I end up steamed and monopolizing his comment section. I totally understand where he’s coming from on paying taxes in a town where he works but doesn’t live, and delight in pointing out the fact that he’s unable to do anything about it. I think he takes it quite well.

What got my goat, however, was a flyover-dweller bitching about California looking to get a little money from the federal government to cover our budget shortfall. Specifically “I Travel for JOOLS” brought this up:

And I just ran across this little article. The money quote, California’s unionized public employees can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of their last year’s pay FOR LIFE !

AND THEY WANT US TO BAIL THEM OUT ????

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803593.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

First, pensions are paid by the pension fund, not by the state directly. Second, she’s citing an article by George Will, who doesn’t know his ass from his elbows regarding how California spends its money. Third, she’s using all-caps, which I find obnoxious. Fourth, she’s using excessive punctuation (one question-mark is sufficient, folks). All of this just serves to raise my hackles regardless of the actual merit of her point, which is rather seductive: California is spending its way into this mess, why should the rest of the country be burdened by this?

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Where does California get its money? Specifically the general fund money that our congress-critters get to fiddle with every year? ebudget.ca.gov provides a nice little summary:

Mostly from income taxes and sales taxes. I see money come out of my paycheck every week on one, and see the other nearly every time I buy anything. I’d just as soon leave these alone or lower them.

Where does the money go? Again, ebudget provides a summary:

Education takes up almost 58% of the state budget. Ouch. That looks like a great place to look for fat to trim. It’s also a political landmine to go anywhere near that portion of the budget without alarming reactionary parents and grandparents. Grandparents vote, you see.

Health and Human Services makes up the next biggest slice of general fund, at about $21,000,000,000. This is the nebulous government waste that I think most libertarians and tea-party types are talking about most of the time that they whinge about government waste. If the federal congress were actually trying to fix health care, this could have been reduced significantly (partly through increase systemic efficiency but largely through federal spending). But they aren’t.

Which brings us to: where the hell is all my tax money going?

I pay my taxes like a good citizen. I look for whatever deductions and credits I may be legally eligible, of course, but I understand that taxes are the price I pay for having a variety of safeguards and comforts that many others in the world don’t enjoy (into religion? love guns? hate paying taxes? you’d love it in Somalia!). But the bulk of the money coming out of my paycheck doesn’t go to Sacramento. It goes to Ogden, Utah. Where the IRS collects my annual 1040 form. So what happens to Californians’ federal tax money?

On the California income tax table, if you earn $70,000 a year (median income for a family of four in the state), and you somehow haven’t managed to deduct your way down to a lower bracket, you pay $2,304 in state income tax. Conversely, the US income tax for that bracket is $9881. That’s a very sloppy calculation, based on $70,000 taxable income without all the typical deductions and such, but really it’s just to demonstrate the proportions involved. I can expect to pay a quarter as much to the state as I do to the federal government in income taxes. It’s a good thing that comes back through federal spending, right? Right?

California produced $313,998,874,000 in gross tax revenue for the United States federal government in 2007. With a population of 36,553,215, that works out to $8,590 for every man, woman, and child. Meanwhile Missouri produced only $48,568,138,000 with their 5,878,415 people ($8,262 per capita). That’s OK, though; we have a progressive income tax, so states with higher typical wages will pay more taxes, and the difference isn’t really that high.

That said, we’re having to pull more of our weight internally than a lot of other states. For every dollar we pay into the federal government, we get $0.78 back. That’s $69,079,752,280 coming out of California taxpayers’ pockets that is landing in places like Missouri that gets back $1.29 in spending for every dollar of federal taxes they pay. Heck, it’s more than the entire tax contribution of that state by a significant margin. It’s also about 75% of our proposed state budget for next year.

I suggest that the Republicans in Sacramento have got it right: we don’t need to raise fees or taxes on Californians. I also suggest that Democrats in Sacramento have it right: we have much-needed health services, correctional institutions, and schools that really need to properly-funded. We need our representatives in Washington DC to start representing us better.

When the revised health care bill kicks its way back to the House of Representatives, Lynn Woolsey and other “progressive” Democrats should demand a better deal. If Woolsey isn’t going to get the public option she wants (much less single-payer), then she should get additional funding for the Palm Drive hospital in Sebastopol and the Sutter Medical Center in Santa Rosa. California should get the same kind of treatment Nebraska gets for Medicaid costs. If her party wants her to swallow her liberal principles to vote for an imperfect bill, she should bring home some bacon for her constituents.

The same goes for our other representatives of both major parties: put your constituents ahead of your party and secure funding for local projects. Your voters are paying for roads and bridges and schools and hospitals and army bases elsewhere, let that money flow back home.

*Mea culpa: I seem to have put a totally ludicrous figure on KC Meesha’s comments page about how much folks in Missouri pay per capita to the feds. I don’t know where that figure came from, but I noticed it while I was writing this up.

*edit: out of ignorance I had some gender pronouns wrong there.

You don’t get many profiles in political courage these days. You get some grandstanding, of course. There are plenty of nutcases that have been put in office, particularly at the state level and in the House of Representatives, sure. But every once in a while you get somebody like Ben Nelson that’s willing to recognize a situation for what it is and act appropriately, even at the risk of burning his colleagues and open himself up to pressure from his own party on a high-profile issue like health care reform.

Nelson isn’t a pro-choice Democrat. I’m not from Nebraska, but so far as I can tell he never has been. The people who voted for him weren’t looking to enshrine the reproductive rights of women. There was a perception that the health care reform bill before the Senate would result in taxpayer money subsidizing abortions, and the Democratic party was scratching and scraping for 60 votes to get cloture. Ben Nelson was in a position to be the 60th vote, the last senator to commit to a “yes” vote. He could have taken the easy route and gone with his party on an issue that was important to the president. He could have taken the somewhat harder route and stuck to his avowed principles regarding the sanctity of human life.

He did neither. He rolled up his sleeves and got to work for his constituents. He burned his party and his ideals, holding out until he could get the best deal possible for his state. Nebraska is set to enjoy a tremendous advantage in Medicare compensation, at a savings likely to total in the billions as health care costs increase for the other 49 states in coming years (barring any actual substantive reform, which doesn’t look likely at the moment). Good for you, Ben Nelson. Good for Nebraska. Bring home the bacon for your voters. I wish my representatives had done the same.

Let’s take a look at a few key indicators of how dangerous the Islamic Republic of Iran is compared to more responsible, civilized, and democratic states in the world. We’ll take this back to 1979, as nobody seriously thinks the current Iranian regime bears any responsibility for anything the Shah did.

I didn’t count United Nations peacekeeping missions as wars for this table. Iran’s invasion of Iraq gets an asterisk for what should be a fairly obvious reason: it was part of a war that started with Iran getting invaded, not the other way around. Compared to many of the more globally-influential powers in the world, Iran has pretty much kept it in their pants for the past thirty years.