Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

Prop 89 establishes publicly funded statewide elections in California, funded by a 0.2% increase in the corporate income tax rate. It also tightens campaign contribution limits and creates a limit of $10,000 for corporate spending on ballot measures. It’s based on AB (Assembly Bill) 583, but when that got stuck in the California Senate, the California Nurses Association (CNA) added the funding source and the contribution limits and got enough signatures to put it on the ballot, largely without consulting with other groups that had supported Clean Money before. That was a stupid move, as I’ll describe below.

Public funding for campaigns is a really good idea, which has been working in Maine and Arizona since 2000 and several other states more recently. I’ll try to counter some of the more popular objections:

I don’t want my tax money going to some slimy politician.

Slimy politicians are selected by our electoral system. In order to run for office, you have to be able to convince people, in particular wealthy people, to give you money. That in itself takes an unusual personality. Then those people tend to call in favors once you’re elected. Even if you started with high ideals, the realities of running a campaign tend to squash them. By funding campaigns, we can encourage better candidates to run in the first place, and perhaps rehabilitate some of the existing ones.

I don’t want my tax money going to politicians I disagree with.

Look at how large corporations do this. They give to both sides of most races so that whoever gets elected owes them favors. Wouldn’t you rather elected officials owe favors to you rather than to big money?

There are better uses for this money.

Direct corporate subsidies in California cost roughly $3 billion each year. Funding all campaigns costs about $200 million. Now, not all subsidies are wasteful, but when the recipients have been funding campaigns for many years, it’s safe to assume that some are. If even 10% of subsidies are wasteful, publicly funded campaigns pay for themselves. That doesn’t even consider the less obvious manipulations of our laws made possible by the legalized bribes we call campaign donations.

There’s just too much money in politics.

Well, yes, but the laws we’ve passed to try to limit spending have either not worked or been unconstitutional limits on speech. It seems that campaign spending is just destined to go up. So we need to work to limit the damage caused by that spending, or even make it beneficial by helping candidates communicate their positions.

And yet instead of letting the bill take its natural course through the legislature and only bring it to the people when it was obvious the legislature was too corrupt to pass it, the CNA impulsively decided to bring it to the people now, without bringing the other sympathetic parties on board. This lost the vote of the teachers’ union and everyone who dislikes the initiative system on principle. On top of that, they added clauses to the bill that serve only to punish corporations. Yes, big business has hurt the state, and may in fact deserve to be punished. But we also need their help to rebuild our society, and pursuing a war between progressives and businessmen helps nobody. By adding punitive language to what should have been just a Clean Elections act, the CNA lost the potential support of moderate businesses and most of the Republican party.

Getting California to adopt clean elections would have been an uphill struggle in any case. There was no reason to make it even harder by alienating many of the potential supporters, especially when clean elections themselves might help enact some of the more overreaching parts of Prop. 89 a few years later. The CNA should be ashamed of having jeopardized this essential measure.

I still think Prop. 89 is worth voting for, despite its flaws. The unfairness to corporations can be fixed over the next few years, despite requiring yet another election to confirm the changes, and clean elections will reduce corruption and help citizens begin to feel like they have a voice again. That whole “voice” thing is actually the best reason to vote for this, over almost any objections. Our democracy only stands a chance if individuals know they can overcome entrenched interests in our society.

Americans have the right to be audible. This is an implied right under the freedom of speech because what is speech, really, if one is forbidden from having an audience? Free speech was designed originally to allow those with political views to argue for those views in the earshot of those who might not already agree about those views. The freedoms of the press and of assembly let us preach to the choir, but only the freedom of speech allows me to try to convert people. Yet this right has been dramatically curtailed in the last several decades:

“Free speech” areas, currently legal under the doctrine of time, place, and manner restrictions.

Ostensibly, these are designed to prevent people from disrupting other people’s speeches and activities. Yet even standing next to the primary focus of an event, I never had the right to disrupt that event (directly at least: the ideas in my speech may be arbitrarily disrupting) with my right to speak. There was no need to ban all speech in certain places in order to prevent that. In practice, these separate-but-equal “speech quarantine” areas are used to shove officially unpopular speech into the background, while discriminating in favor of speech endorsed by those in power. Those whose speech is favored by the state get to use its resources to project their message, while those whose speech is disfavored aren’t even allowed to be seen.

Speech in “private” places.

Malls have significantly replaced the public square as the centers of American community life. Yet they currently may forbid any political speech within their property. This, of course, leaves political speech with no effective place to live. The malls argue that since they own the property, they have the right to determine what goes on within it, and this would be a perfectly reasonable argument, were they just a private area. Yet the civil rights movement set the precedent that a business open to the public must obey a higher standard than, say, a private office. This should extend not just to the people but also to the activities allowed inside. Of course, the diners favored for the civil rights movement’s sit-ins are too small to allow public speech without disrupting the primary business of the place. But any place, like a mall, or some bookstores and coffee shops, which is intended as a public forum, must allow all speech in that area, not just that speech deemed acceptable to the management.

Finally, advertisements.

Commercials are a more subtle issue because they’re never exactly open to the public; they’re merely a way to pay for the ability to speak to large numbers of people at once. But, once the basic exchange of money for speech has been established, it must be executed without any more discrimination about the content of the ads than is allowed in government-owned places. If a car company can pay $100,000 to tell me to buy a car, Adbusters must be able to pay $100,000 to tell me not to buy a car. Station owners argue that allowing certain content in their commercials will drive off other advertisers. This argument should be disregarded for two reasons: First, the government created these profits in the first place by establishing the monopolies over broadcasting. Second, the right of a human being to speak, and thereby effect change, trumps any claim of a corporation to make money.

The freedom of speech has been slowly taken away in recent history by both the gradual reduction in public space and apparently minor procedural restrictions like speech quarantine areas. It’s time to reverse that decline and take back our right to be audible.

Remember, remember the fifth of November
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people. — V for Vendetta

Go see it. And if you happen to know anyone who isn’t convinced that we must be ever vigilant against governments trying to take away our essential Liberty, in return for a little temporary safety, take them too.

I went to San Francisco today on the Freedom Train to attend the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. The celebration left something to be desired — people were not singing in the aisles, or demanding that MLK’s work be completed. At one point, a rabbi reminded us that, though we may be “Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics”, we all worship one god. *sigh* silly monotheists. And I worry about these kinds of celebrations of individual people. It’s very easy to try to co-opt the holiday by saying, this is what Martin Luther King would have done, without considering whether he actually would. Perhaps that hasn’t happened to MLK, and I hope it never does, but it happened to Jesus, so we need to stay vigilant.

However, Martin Luther King was a great man and deserves to be remembered (as Sunshine said most eloquently). And, more importantly, his work is not completed, and urgently needs to be pursued. Unfortunately, the remaining work is harder than that already completed. Racism and other prejudices of any form are no longer publicly acceptable. There are no longer officially segregated restrooms, businesses, and schools. There is no more enemy, or rather, the enemy has melted into the general population. Blacks who kill whites are far more likely to receive the death penalty, yet it’s difficult to call any single case an instance of racism. And both blacks and latinos suffer a disproportional homicide rate, yet we don’t care enough to do much besides throwing people in prison after the fact.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

I don’t really care that some people are richer than others. I care that the rich use their money to get richer. And, even more importantly, the rich use their money to make sure their children are rich too. We talk a lot in this country about equality of opportunity, but the truth is, the poor just aren’t getting it. But the rich don’t have to know this. Increasingly, they can use their money to isolate themselves in walled gardens where they only have to interact with other rich people. As long as races remain segregated by their incomes, we rich whites can keep our prejudices about both other races and the poor by never meeting any counterexamples. And, we can continue to sabotage our society by defunding essential social programs, knowing that our money will keep us out of trouble. Until it is too late anyway. This is not just!

The rich have no right to be isolated from social problems they create. If they are unwilling to do it voluntarily, they must be forced to confront the real struggles of the working poor. It is time to desegregate the neighborhoods, not just the schools, by both race and class.

Comments, again, on the blog, so I see them and they survive more than 30 days on lj.

A scenario: Tom and Sally have sex. Sally gets pregnant. Assuming they don’t get married, what happens? Sally can abort the fetus or not. If not, she can give the child up for adoption or not. If not, Tom can pay child support or not. How should they decide what to do?

I think it is completely Sally’s decision whether to have an abortion. I don’t think this is obvious though. The potential child she’s carrying would be a shared child. At least after the child is born, they’d have roughly equal rights to it, so perhaps they should have equal rights to the fetus as well. Tom may see an abortion as killing his child. Nevertheless, as wicked_wish put it, she’s effectively carrying a life-threatening parasite, and nobody else has the right to force her to do it for nine months. However, her decision to abort or not may be informed by external circumstances, as I’ll discuss next.

The decision to give the child up for adoption is shared. Neither parent has the exclusive right to raise the child, and neither has the right to prevent or force the other to raise it. I think this is obvious, but I’d be happy to hear any disagreement.

I think the decision to pay child support is entirely up to Tom. If Tom didn’t want a kid, Sally has no right to force one on him. Of course, he should make this decision early, before Sally decides whether to abort, and if he decides not to help support the kid, it is simply no longer his child: he gets no parental rights. A promise to help support the kid should be legally and ethically binding even if he changes his mind later. But if Tom doesn’t want a child, and makes that known early, he is not a deadbeat dad.

I’m not sure what should happen if Sally doesn’t want to financially support the child, but Tom wants to keep it, and she wants to keep her parental rights. She bore the child for nine months, which should count for something, but a child costs a lot to raise, probably more than the worth of nine months of time, even nine pregnant months. It feels wrong to talk of buying parental rights, but it could be the right way to handle this. You pay $X, you get so much parental rights. The nine months of pregnancy should count as hazardous duty (double/triple normal salary?), but perhaps aren’t anything qualitatively different.

I don’t really know how child support is handled now, so the last two paragraphs may be totally off-base. But I’m sure someone among my readers will have an idea. Comments/flames here.

This war has a popular label and a political label, but it’s not accurate. Terrorism is a means of power projection, it’s a weapon, it’s a tool of war. Think of it as our enemy’s stealth bomber. This is no more a war on terrorism than World War II was a war on submarines. It’s not just semantics … Words have meaning. And these words are leading us down to the wrong concept.

Lieutenant General Wallace Gregson, quoted by Britt Blaser

Wow, this guy’s good.

I can’t find it in myself to care about the at-least-50 people who died in the London bombings two days ago. For that matter, I couldn’t care about the almost 200 killed in Madrid or the almost 3,000 who died in New York. Certainly it’s sad that human beings died, but I didn’t know them. I would care if anyone I know died. If I know anyone who lost someone in these attacks, my heart is with you. But it’s not with the thousands of people I don’t know, who lost someone.

And for that matter, why should I care? What makes these 3,250 people’s lives more important than, say, the hundreds of thousands who starve to death every year because our agribusiness is more important than their livelihoods? Or the millions of Americans whose lives are torn apart by the idiocy of the drug war? Oh, that’s right: they’re white, and the brown people did it. It’s not that the grief for the people killed in London is racist, but the fact that we care so much more about this tragedy than the thousands of others happening daily makes me sick.

A friend proposed another explanation yesterday. When a few people set bombs that kill 50, we have a very short chain of cause and effect, and we can point to the people responsible. When we refuse aid to organizations that promote the use of condoms, and five years later, a quarter of Africa has AIDS, the chain of causality is longer, and more people were involved: it’s harder to pin the blame on any one person. When we vote for a war on drugs, and fifteen years later a third of the black population has been in prison, not only is it harder to follow the causal chain, when we finally come to its beginning, we find ourselves. It’s really hard to admit that, yes, I had a hand in causing this tragedy.

But no matter which psychological reason explains our grief for Londoners rather than Africans, I can’t make myself believe that 50 lives have different values in different places. I have only a certain amount of energy that I can use for grieving, and it has to be split up among all of the world’s unnecessary pain. 50 Londoners just don’t deserve that much.

As I announced a few weeks ago, I was asked to give the student speech at my graduation. Here’s what I wound up saying. You’ll notice that the punctuation and capitalization isn’t always correct. That’s because I used the grammar to give me cues on how to say it. Thank you to everyone who helped me write it, even or especially if I seemed to resist your ideas. It wouldn’t have been nearly this good without you.

(more…)

I’ve been thinking about taxes recently and reading Andrew Sullivan’s opinions on them, and I’m mostly convinced that a flat tax with a significant standard deduction/personal exemption is at least a reasonable idea. I haven’t yet convinced myself to support it, but I can’t think of any arguments against it. The Rockridge Institute has a good argument that rich people should be expected to pay more in taxes than poor people: they get more in return from the government. But that doesn’t easily extend to an argument that they should pay a higher percentage of their income. If you have a good argument against a flat tax, please comment.

If we assume that no tax should interfere with your ability to feed and house your family and that taxes should treat everyone equally otherwise, then we get the following system. First, add up all of your income. That includes both money you worked for and interest and capital gains. Subtract the poverty line for your household. Multiply that by the tax rate, which is the same for everyone. Pay that amount to the government. Oh, and payroll taxes are evil and should be rolled into the standard income tax.

tax        = net_income * tax_rate
net_income = income - poverty_line(your_household)
income     = earned_income + capital_gains
             + interest + forgotten_stuff?

Variations are possible on this theme. We’d probably want to keep some deductions, like for green vehicles, mortgage payments, and charitable donations. These can be subtracted from the net_income. Given deductions, we might want an alternative minimum tax, which could be simply (income - poverty_line) * lower_tax_rate, and then your tax is the larger of the two. Finally, we might want some tax credits. I suspect that these are a bad idea, and that the government should directly subsidize anything it is tempted to give a tax credit for, but they easily fit in as a decrease in the total tax.

In Tim Bray’s second post of opposition to Google AutoLink, he mentions that they owe it to their shareholders to do one of two evil things. Now, neither of Bray’s suggestions may actually be in Google’s long-term interest, but they certainly are in its short-term interest.

The basic question is, does our culture really believe that a corporation’s highest obligation is to its shareholders? That is, are corporations out there solely to make money? If a corporation obviously sacrifices sort-term or even long-term profits in order to, say, make the internet a better place for everyone, does it open itself up to shareholder lawsuits, as Cryptonomicon suggests? Corporations and their shareholders receive from society significant advantages simply because they are incorporated. They should be expected to give up some profits in order to give something back.

The Food and Drug Administration regulates drugs wrong. They have a hugely long and expensive testing process which terminates in a simple yes-or-no decision about whether that particular drug can be sold. This delays the use of many life-saving drugs and drives up their prices when they are finally released. There is a better way.

(more…)

America’s immigration system is also outdated — unsuited to the needs of our economy and to the values of our country. We should not be content with laws that punish hardworking people who want only to provide for their families, and deny businesses willing workers, and invite chaos at our border. It is time for an immigration policy that permits temporary guest workers to fill jobs Americans will not take….

George Bush’s 2005 State of the Union (emphasis mine)

Bush’s anti-worker bias is clear in this proposal for more corporate welfare. The idea that there exist any jobs at all which Americans will not take but Mexicans will, is simply bad economics. The archetypal example of this kind of job is garbage collector. It’s an unpleasant job that gets very little respect from the rest of society. In order to get enough garbage collectors, companies were forced to raise their wages. Let’s get this straight: Americans will do any job you ask them to, as long as you pay them enough.

But this isn’t good enough for Bush. Instead of allowing the market to do its job by paying workers more, he wants to keep labor costs down by importing workers who will be completely at the mercy of their boss. If they’re being mistreated or underpaid, they can’t look for another job. It’s their boss’s whims or back to Mexico. They’re forced to work for as little as their boss wants to pay, and this, in turn, drives down American wages. I’d be fine with easier immigration: new Americans can bargain for higher pay. But George Bush cannot be allowed to import wage-slaves.

Howard Dean has clearly been reading George Lakoff. He gave a speech at George Washington University which lays out his vision for the future of the Democratic Party. He’s clearly tired of people trying to push the party right. Instead, he wants the Democratic Party to start framing the debate. It’s worth reading.

Apparently, the U.S. has been eliminating those who count civilian deaths in Iraq. I can understand why American generals would want to hide the number of civilian casualties: large numbers of dead innocents enrages the Iraqi resistance and erodes support for the war at home. They see the suppression as justified because what casualties there are are unavoidable (and they do deserve credit for keeping this number as low as it is), and because the rest of the world just doesn’t understand the realities of war. But they’re wrong.

The world has a right to know what’s going on in Iraq. If we have to lie to justify the war, the war is not justified. Now, the mere existence of civilian casualties does not unjustify the war. World War II had millions of civilian casualties, and nobody considers it unjustified. But they can certainly contribute to the feeling that a war simply isn’t worth it. If the Iraq War has reached this point, the world deserves to know.

However, even if their end is justified, nothing justifies the means they’re using. Nothing justifies targeting civilians. Killing journalists is bad enough. Invading hospitals and bombing clinics is appalling.

By using these tactics, the United States continues to sacrifice its moral authority.

[spotter=Danny Ayers]

Yet the shills are more welcome than ever in the nation’s television newsrooms. That’s because the big networks have chosen to be fair instead of objective. The reason for their choice? Being fair is easier. Rather than digging up facts and seeking out expert analysis, the newshounds can call in a couple of shills from either side of an issue to shout at each other. Doing it that way saves a whole lot of time and hard work. What’s more, the anchors don’t ever need to think about the issues for themselves.

Daniel Altman on October 13th

Daniel Altman (incidentally, the author of Neoconomy: George Bush’s Revolutionary Gamble With America’s Future) agrees with Jon Stewart’s point on Crossfire and has given it a name: fair versus objective. This lets us see that Fox’s tagline, Fair and Balanced, is actually correct. They are fair and balanced, presenting someone from each side of an issue to respond to issues framed in a clearly non-objective manner.

I just received an email from an aunt asking that I sign this petition. It asks the United Nations to adopt an Anti-Semitism Resolution that basically says, We’ve already adopted all these resolutions prohibiting intolerance based on religion. They apply extra specially to Jews. Sounds pretty redundant to me. Possibly counter-productive: why are hate crimes against Jews worse than hate crimes against other groups? I have seen reports of rising anti-semitism, but I haven’t seen any that say that law enforcement has been reluctant to prosecute those who commit anti-semitic crimes. That says to me that governments aren’t doing anything wrong, and the UN doesn’t need to get involved.

Instead, maybe we need to look at some root causes. And get a thicker skin. Criticizing Israel is not anti-semitism. Even comparing Sharon to Hitler isn’t anti-semitic. (Sure, it’s anti-Sharon.) It’s pretty standard fare to compare war criminals to Nazis.

Saying that all Jews are evil because of Israel’s crimes is anti-semitic, but this over-generalization is in good company. How many Jews have you heard saying that Arabs can’t be trusted or are violent because they’ve seen some suicide bombers on the news? The World Jewish Congress’s motto doesn’t help: All Jews are responsible for one another. Well then, they admitted it. I’m responsible for Sharon’s and Israel’s war crimes. Can we really be surprised when some street thug decides to punish me for them?

The New Yorker has an article on how and why the abuses at Abu Ghraib happened. The chain of responsibility leads all the way to Rumsfeld. <http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040524fa_fact> I’m not hopeful that these particular abuses are an impeachable offense for Bush, but they could lead to significant restrictions on black ops.

And then, another reaction.

Edit: Another very interesting article: <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28340-2004May14?language=printer> If it asks you to register, please comment and I’ll try to fix it.

Leftist rag proclaims end of American Dream through drop in social mobility! Read it all at http://www.businessweek.com/@@SV5bKocQnzhS3BUA/magazine/content/03_48/b3860067_mz021.htm.

(You may have to register. If you don’t want to, it’s reprinted at http://reclaimdemocracy.org/weekly_2003/american_dream_death.html)

Edit December 5, 2004

More evidence that the dream is dying can be found at the Rockridge Institute: By 2003, the income and benefits sufficient to reach the [American] Dream for an average family of four in the U.S. reached $46,500, … [but] half of all men who worked full-time and full year earned less than $40,668.

Wow, it’s been a whole year. One year ago today, around 11 million people around the world protested against the planned war against Iraq.

(more…)