Around town I’ve been seeing flyers and signs for quite awhile saying the above, with “vote YES on Feb 7th”.  At the grocery store, in the parking lots of various banks, restaurants, etc.  There were even some in the local brewpub.  I asked the guy at the bar about it, in between swigs of a rather damn good rye IPA, and he mentioned they supported it because of funding for a downtown trolley.  Not much more detail, but it’s not exactly a shock that a bar would heartily approve of something that translates to more people being able to come there without driving, y’know? I just had to find out more about this.

Here’s the gist: the “yes” vote would increase the city sales tax by a half-percent (it is currently 7.75%…) over the next ten years.  The funds from that are supposed to go towards a series of projects (here‘s a list of the projects on the site of the ones promoting this) determined by the city council and an “Economic Development Tax Board”.

Total projected cost: $40,000,000.  Now what I have to say about it:

• My primary concern is the funding of it. Why a sales tax?  Frankly I wonder what the hell has been done with the money they’re already getting from the current rate.  For the amount I get smacked every time I replenish my fridge, I would have expected more improvement than I’ve seen.
• This sounds like the local scale version of a stimulus plan, the idea being (as with the state and federal level) that since people aren’t consuming as much as they were, government must fill the void.  Clearly this ignores reasons why people aren’t consuming (…lack of money, anyone?  Bueller?), and on the local level due to the aforementioned funding mechanism directly makes what people are already buying more expensive.
• The main backers of the plan (who also would be part of the “Economic Development Tax Board”) are the local Board of Realtors & Chamber of Commerce.  So, whose issues do you think would be dealt with first?  The structure of this, even if there are projects that you think would be useful, makes the transparency questionable.  I imagine people voting for what they think is a simple infrastructure upgrade and ending up with an open-ended business handout.
• Just how “temporary” is a tax, ever, in practice?

I read some letters to the editor that were in the paper about this.  Some of them characterized Jefferson City as a “sleepy, government town stuck in the 50′s”.  First of all, yes it is a relatively small town for a state capital, but anyone going on the “stuck in the 50′s” line I humbly invite to spend some time here.  I am not liable in the event that you claw your eyes out.  Second…have you thought through the logic of citing such as a complaint when your response is a government-business partnership and higher taxes?

Though there are a few things mentioned that could be positive detached from the concept as a whole, the funding idea is ridiculous and the planning can’t be trusted.  Mark me down as a No.

So…who’s surprised I brought up a local issue here?

Lately I’ve been thinking about those occasional poll results that show up (for example) saying, contrary to their public image, that even a majority of Republicans think the finance sector and big business have too much power.  Does anyone ever ask them why they think that’s the case?  With the Dem rank and file it’s fairly obvious their view (they see the state as somehow a check on this rather than its enabler, in the face of much evidence to the contrary), but there’s nothing I recall hearing or reading anywhere about the thought of GOP folk who hold that view. Odd, since this completely contradicts the view the people they apparently vote for subscribe to.

On a related note: since Gingrich and Romney have been flinging poo at each other screaming “you’re a crony capitalist!” “no, you are!”, the next debate could use a couple additional questions:
“Newt, you’ve made a point lately of bringing up Romney’s time at Bain Capital, and Romney has since released information showing his effective tax rate.  Since you question the value of his profession, what do you think his tax rate should be?”
“Mitt, you’ve responded to Newt’s criticism by pointing out his time as a — using his term — ‘historian’ for the Federal National Mortgage Association. Could you describe for us the difference, other than of scope, between the federal government backing FNMA’s debt and the Pension Benefits Guarantee Corporation backing GS Technologies’ pension fund prior to its closure?”

An obvious reason brought up for this is lower wages, but merely pay alone doesn’t quite get to the heart of the labor disparity.  Consider the following observation about the iPhone’s screen:

One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.” [emphasis mine]

Dorms? Long days? People waking you up whenever they feel like it? Sounds like college minus the fun parts.  Or prison…

The emphasis on flexibility is interesting in the total contrasting lack of it for the labor force. Literally living at your job, required to be available at all hours, you can imagine how much compensation people in the states would expect for this arrangement — and they would have good reason to do so, as they’d have no life outside of work.  Sock it away for another day I guess…wait, what’s that? They only make $17 a day?

This being a tech company we’re talking about, it’s not like it’s all super-routine work. Mere numbers can’t explain everything, right?

Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.

Any ideas what they mean by “mid level” skills?  And who previously did the training, if it has stopped?

Protectionist sentiment looks at this and chalks it up the the free market gone crazy.  As usual, it’s a bit more complicated — as in, “what free market?”.  Back to the issue of the screens, this time the initial decision to use glass rather than plastic:

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day. [emphasis mine]

Aggressive government channeling of the means of production, as undertaken by the ruling Communist Party of China, playing capitalism’s tune.  The irony could choke a horse.

The article goes on to describe another supplier, Foxconn (yes, that Foxconn…), and their “city” (didn’t we try that concept before?).  Needless to say, Foxconn spokespeople brushed off the human rights and screwing-out-of-pay concerns.

Though the gist of the article is meant as a U.S.-centric concern, the primary thing I think about on this isn’t domestic in nature.  What does jump out at me is how, despite the admissions of the front office people how important to the end product these workers are, they have such negligible leverage.  They know the product yet would surely starve if they attempted to buy it, due not to mere numbers but to a system that deliberately keeps them at the bottom, unable to meaningfully organize and without the means to potentially adapt their skills to break away endeavors (think about it: without IP and bottom of the barrel wages in a closed market, how do you keep people in a job getting desperate enough to where the backlash takes the form of threatened mass suicide?).  Throwing off those chains and seizing their rights would, due to the long term gains in standard of living, work out better for all of us.

Well, except maybe Tim Cook & the Chinese government.

Actors in adult movies filmed in America’s pornography capital would be required to use condoms under an ordinance granted final approval Tuesday by the Los Angeles City Council.

The measure, adopted 9-1, next goes to the mayor for his signature. Before it can take effect, however, the City Council has ordered police officials, the city attorney and others to hold meetings to figure out how it might be enforced. (emphasis mine)

…maybe they should’ve thought about that before they passed the damn thing in the first place?

You all remember the old saw that Americans are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal? It means that lots of Americans say they’re conservative and like to believe they’re conservative, but when it comes to specific government programs they turn out to be pretty liberal. They like Medicare and Social Security and federal highways and disaster relief and unemployment insurance and all that. Try to cut these things and you learn very quickly just how operationally liberal most Americans are.

Two assumptions are being made here.  Let’s deal with the first: by pointing out that people tend to like these types of spending in the context of calling them operationally liberal, Kevin is assuming that people approve of such programs for the same reasons he does, which amount to the typical “Good Government” blather.  Yet, if most of this support were due to such a view of the State, then wouldn’t people express much less negativity about it when asked than they do?  Polls showing distrust in the government are so regular that it has become cliche. To assume that this support comes from the same place that Kevin’s does is to obliterate the distinction he himself makes between ideology and practice.  From my reading of public sentiment, it’s more like this:

• Social Security: The gap between wage growth for most people and the cost of living makes actual savings nearly a pipe dream.  The learned dependency due to this has merged with the phasing out of automatic pensions after retirement as part of the reversal of the corporate-paternalism deal (“Big concentrations of the means of production are a-ok long as our insurance & retirement are paid”) that folks like Michael Moore and Ed Schultz wax so romantic over.  Also, not insignificantly…well damn, the tax is taken out of their paychecks anyway, they want that money back.
• Medicare: Factors that make health care artificially expensive in the first place hit the elderly even harder since they tend to have more severe and/or chronic conditions.  The capacity of others to assist outside of government has been nullified due to the above mentioned savings problem, and (again) they pay the tax so they want their money back.
• Federal highways: This is How Things Are Done for most people today, alternatives are generally not thought of and the negatives (eminent domain, the inevitable carving up of poorer neighborhoods to make way for a bypass, tying of highway funds to obedience on other policies) get shoved aside.  Besides, once you build them, they’re going to need maintenance — unless you enjoy potholes and driving over bridges that feel like they’re going to collapse.
• Disaster relief: Once again, How Things Are Done for most people.  Also, it’s an issue that tends to not even come up unless in the midst of a disaster.
• Unemployment insurance: See above with regard to savings. Oh, btw: they pay for it anyway, why not get it back when they need it?  That’s what insurance is.

There’s nothing particularly “conservative” about any of this. Nor is there anything “liberal” about it either.  Generally it’s common sense as deployed within a constrained range of choices.

So, that assumption has been dealt with as unfounded.  The other one is that liberalism is merely a matter of favoring tax-funded benefits (the opposite assertion, that conservatism is anti-spending, is already rendered laughable by the comments and actions of even right-wing opinion leaders, so it’s not even worth focus).  For someone who identifies himself with that “side”, such a view comes off as the philosophical equivalent to a self-inflicted bullet wound.   Where his post was linked, a reply by Tim Kowal taking offense to the cited “old saw” that started all this, I contributed the following comment:

Between the remarks about elderly benefits and the vitriol that they throw at anyone on their “side” ideologically who questions the commitment of the party they tend to support to civil liberties and global restraint, I find myself wanting to ask: How small is American liberalism? Is it really just Managerialism + Medicare?

Consider how much, outside of the Greenwald/FireDogLake faction, the focus has basically been reactive, very narrowly construed towards maintenance and defense of programs from decades ago, meanwhile reminiscing on a mythical golden age.  Pointing out that the period being thought of coincided with things that no one within a mile of capital-L Liberalism should approve of and asking why that’s the case gets you excommunicated.

Tim refers to this for a different reason, being a conservative and all, asserting basically that liberals “won”.  I’d say it’s more accurate to say that the state won.  Winners don’t normally eat themselves.

For several months, media “analysis” of the field has repeatedly and relentlessly rested on “well, they’re going to have to just swallow Romney eventually”.  It wouldn’t be far fetched to assume that the type of people that vote in primaries pay attention to this, and it possibly shapes their view of the whole process to an extent.  I wonder how many people who are breaking for Romney at the last minute actually did so because they felt like supporting other candidates was a waste?  Hmm, perhaps some pollster should include that as a question…

As for Romney himself, I recall a joke prior to the actual voting that, since the highest polling GOP candidate against Obama was the Generic Republican slot that Mitt was filing to have his name changed to Generic Republican.  Well he’s pretty much done that, at least until this latest kink*.  Maybe he could convince Metta World Peace to be his running mate?

Nah, too Paul like. If it was Metta World War he’d be a better fit.

(* – In a way this makes sense.  Whatever the economics problem with establishing a wage floor, the combination of one with inflation wiping it out and regular fights over addressing the difference make it worse.  If they’re going to insist, then index it to inflation and be done with it.  I shouldn’t have to explain that I’d much prefer the condition of the working poor be alleviated by way of mutual aid and the removal of the boot from labor’s neck, referring to the world as it is does not void where I would like to see it go.)

Coming up so close behind Romney in Iowa he could smell his sweat has former senator Santorum feeling rather cocky and full of himself.  As a result, his initial penetration into New Hampshire, seeking to fill the gap in the polls, involves making people come to grips with his throbbing passion over gays.  So far it’s looking very sloppy, with more friction than he expected:

As he campaigns among the state’s notoriously grumpy electorate, presidential candidate Rick Santorum has spent as much time arguing with prospective voters over same-sex marriage as he has asking them for their support. [...]

“I have a question and it’s about gay people,” asked the first man to be called on at a Santorum town hall meeting here today. “They are children of God too. Do they have the right to marriage? Do they have the right to serve in the military? Should they be treated like any other citizen? Under your presidency, would you protect their rights or would you diminish them?”

Santorum answered that he doesn’t believe marriage or serving in the military are inalienable rights, but “privileges,” adding, “It’s not discrimination not to grant privileges.”

Clearly, Santorum never had a chance of winning this man’s affection.

Undeterred, he sashayed on down the road to press the flesh at a college prep school in Dublin, where the young students came at him with hard questions, prompting Santorum to unleash his passions with a particular thrust:

“You’re robbing children of something that they need, they deserve, they have a right to. They have a right to be know and be loved by their dad or their mom,” he said. “That’s what marriage is about. It’s not about two people loving each other.

“There’s nothing hateful about that. There’s something true about that.”

Rick doesn’t seem to realize how deep he went with this.  He may think he’s simply smearing gays, but unzip this firm statement and you come to see it spreads much further, covering not only the gays that Santorum has his mind so focused on but also adults in positions such as being single parents, or couples that don’t particularly want children.

Ironically for how he approaches the climax of his view on this, to spit that marriage is not about love is to split the meaning of such a connection, hardening it into little more than a three-way contract.  For a stiff expression of values to shrivel down to the cold unloving fist of government…that really screws any semblance of sincerity.

To call with a straight face, in these times, for the state to serve as the hand of god is not a ballsy move.  It is mere demonstration one is not using their head.

-”People are thinking anti-intervention? Well, DUH, Iraq & Afghanistan! Paul means squat!”

It’s true that the American public is less enamored of war these days than it used to be, but the obvious reason for this can be summed up in two words: Afghanistan and Iraq. Americans are more skeptical of military adventurism than they were ten years ago because the shock of 9/11 has worn off and we’ve gone through two spectacularly disastrous foreign wars. Ron Paul has played almost no role in this at all.

-”Paul is speaking a foreign language on this stuff, no one will agree!”

If you want to advance the cause of a less interventionist foreign policy, you need to find a way to persuade the American public to agree with you. Ron Paul doesn’t do that. He’s never done that. He’s such a stone libertarian that he literally doesn’t know the language to do it.

Um…didn’t you just say people agreed without Ron Paul’s input? Where would the persuasion even come in if people are already there?

This isn’t even the most revealing part of Kevin’s post though. He saves that for a postscript:

I’m in favor of a less interventionist foreign policy, a view that has plenty of voices these days not named Ron Paul, but I’m not a hardcore non-interventionist like Paul. If Iran seriously tried to mine the Strait of Hormuz, for example, I’d fully expect the U.S. Navy to put a stop to it, even if that meant sinking a few Iranian vessels.

If you remember nothing else when it comes to international policy, remember this: people do things for a reason.

In such an exchange, which Kevin is saying he would support, the incentives on both sides — why Iran would mine the strait, and why the U.S. Navy would sink Iranian ships in response — need to be thought of.  In Iran’s case, there are other nations in the region that use the strait, and it is assumed that they would see a problem with Iran effectively monopolizing safe passage through it.  As such, it is not merely the U.S. government that such a move would antagonize.  Could they possibly convince their neighbors that this move was worth the damage to them, merely to annoy the U.S., or would they react in ways up to and including sparing the U.S. Navy the waste of ammunition?

In the U.S.’s case, the use of the strait by Iran’s neighbors and also by others as a pass-through for trade reasons makes it important, but shows obvious incentive for those other than the U.S. to be concerned about access to it.  For perspective, here’s a map (click the thumbnail to expand):

Point “A” on that map is Washington, D.C.  Point “B” is the Strait of Hormuz.  What Kevin is asserting as unquestionable is that the primary responsibility of B falls at A.  Whatever you may think of the utility of this, the reasoning behind it has gone unexamined long enough.

Take a survey of a representative sample of likely primary voters, except instead of asking about particular candidates, ask nothing but questions about particular policy stands they would support or oppose. From the results, describe comprehensively what their ideal candidate would look like from a purely political standpoint.  Anyone paying attention after that point would have an idea of what was being sought out.

If this is already being done, then no one is paying attention to it.  If it isn’t, I doubt it will be done ever, as it makes too much sense. Either way, I’m just sick of hearing about it.

See you next year.