My old buddy Morte posted today about the death of the Presidential Election Reform Act. Since statehood, California has gone with a winner-takes-all approach. Given the size of California, with its 53 representatives in the House and two Senators, that’s quite a prize for whichever candidate can scratch out one more vote than any of his competitors.

The main objection I’ve heard regarding the recently-stalled proposal was that California would effectively be throwing a bundle of electoral votes to the less popular candidate. The basic underlying assumption here is that next year Californians will mostly queue up to vote for whoever the Democratic candidate is for president. Since the Presidential Election Reform Act divvies up votes by congressional district, this means that a handful of Republican ghettoes, products of decades of political gerrymandering, would yield electoral votes to whoever the Republican candidate is. This would detract from the avalanche of Californian Electors lining up to back the Democrat.

Basically what we have here is two political parties trying to decide the election before the election. Each sees the current system rigged in the Democrats’ favor this time around, and each has a strong preference in the outcome. I totally understand that and expect it. The debate over PERA was polite and restrained compared to the usual skullduggery and election fraud we normally see. What surprised me was Morte’s general take on the situation, which he described thusly:

For the record, I favor initiatives that distribute electoral votes proportionate to the popular vote, rather than by CD or winner-take-all. Of course, doing that way would make the Electoral College redundant, and why would anyone in their right mind want to make an archaic institution appear redundant?

Does this mean that he would favor a percentage of Californias 55 Electors be determined by the corresponding percentage of Californians that vote that way? In 2004, this would have resulted in 30 going to John Kerry, 25 to George W. Bush. In 2000, this would have resulted in 30 going to Al Gore, 22 going to George W. Bush, and 2 going to Ralph Nader.

Small problem: if counted by congressional district instead of by statewide proportion, Bush would have only recieved 19 electors from the Golden State in 2000. By proportion, he would have received even more. There wouldn’t have been a change in outcome in the 1996, 2000, or 2004 elections, but the Bush presidency would have had a stronger air of legitimacy. For somebody as clearly and consistently allied with the Democratic party line, my old friend appears to have strayed. Or did he?

Two alternate solutions that may better suit the delicate sensibilities of a 21st-century liberal type:

1. Instant runoff: Let the people vote for who they really want. Rather than check a single box, rank the candidates in order of preference. If you really like that Green Party candidate but are afraid the Libertarian will win, just make sure you put your fall-back candidate into the mix. Once it has settled down to somebody having an actual majority of votes, hand the 55 electors over and congratulate the hard-fought campaigner. I bet Nader and Badnarik would have received a lot more votes had this been an option. Instant Runoff has been slowly gaining ground at the local level, and may be viable at the state level soon.
2. National Popular Vote Interstate Compact: let the national popular vote stand as the true vote of the land. The basic concept is that if enough states agree to cast all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, the Electoral College becomes entirely redundant. Maryland, with 10 electoral votes, is the only state currently pledged to participate in this scheme. California’s attempt to join in on the pact was vetoed in 2006 by our beloved governator.

The Presidential Election Reform Act failed largely because Californians have given up on our congressional districts as being hopelessly gerrymandered. The Democrats and Republicans have constructed for themselves safe seats in the state and national legislatures. Could tying presidential election success to our congressional districts lead to a serious re-thinking of how we draw up our district boundaries? I don’t know, but it would have been interesting to see the chaos in Sacramento had this measure shown up on the ballot.

Estate Tax / Death Tax

Both of these are referring to the same thing, but from different angles. If you have assets when you die, they are divided up according to your will, trust, or whatever the intestate defaults in your area are. The Estate Tax is applied to this lump sum of assets and capital, with a bewildering array of special cases and exemptions. Entire law firms revolve around the nuances of these taxes. Then another tax, an inheritance tax, is levied on individual beneficiaries of the estate. This varies by state, and some states just don’t have an inheritance tax at all. The basic case for the estate tax is that it is unearned income on the part of the recipient. Luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin were strongly in favor of taxing the inheritance of wealth as a hedge against the establishment of a leisure class.

The “Estate Tax” name carries with it certain connotations of opulence and draws very little sympathy at the gut level; do you feel sorry for a Rockefeller having to pay almost half of the billions he may receive from daddy to the government? Not really. A number of minimum values and exemptions make this truly an Estate Tax.

The “Death Tax” name carries the opposite connotation, that you’re being punished for having died. You earned your money and should be able to do whatever you damned well please with it. Politicians and interest groups that are firmly against the inheritance tax almost exclusively use this term, evoking images of family farms and small businesses going to ruin as government sycophants tear apart grieving families. No matter that family-owned farms have exemptions; that wouldn’t fit into the narrative.

Back to that Rockefeller example, let’s abstract it down a bit: if you were to die and leave an estate of $10,000,000 that was entirely subject to a 50% tax (it wouldn’t, but let’s keep the numbers round), you’d be leaving your beneficiaries $5,000,000. If this windfall were dumped into a 10-year treasury bond form the United States Treasury, it would yield a 3.89% return and be back up to the original sum in under 18 years, all paid for by the same general tax revenue. It’s like a snake eating its own tail, really.

As for where the money goes, well… That’s another matter entirely. As long as the government has programs that consume funds (such as a military, postal service, legislators, and so forth), it will need to raise revenue from somewhere. Getting the money from people who are doing very well strikes me as the least painful way to do this.

Please call it what it is, an estate tax. The person that had it doesn’t need it any more, and if that person’s heirs need more than a couple million dollar leg up on life to get by, shame on them.

Game over, folks. Other candidates have threatened that America will be attacked by terrorists if they aren’t elected, but only Mike Huckabee can bring the threat of roundhouse kicks to America’s head.