Results...

What's your take on the impact of Prop 26 on AB 32? I personally didn't really have it on my radar until just recently, when the No on 23 folks started talking about it. Once I saw what it was, I was shocked that it could have stayed under their radar for so long. A case of tunnel vision? I don't know.

My worry is that if Prop 26 is as restrictive as some suggest, it will allow AB32 to be implemented, but ineffectively. In some ways, that would be worse -- a "victory" without progress is harder to rally against than an outright defeat.

On the other hand, my understanding is that Prop 26 applies to fees that would be imposed by the legislature, while AB32 is expected to be implemented primarily by CARB. If so, is Prop 26 really a big deal in the context of AB32? (Granted it's a fundamentally dumb idea in other ways.)

I don't know enough about that particular aspect to comment in any more detail than what you can learn from reading the No on 23 folks; I'd check NRDC and the Union of Concerned Scientists for analysis. But I'm quite sure that putting a 2/3 restriction on revenues is awful, regardless of the details. :-/

I am still in disagreement on what you believe is a "fair share". I think that if the wealthy are paying X amount (not percent, amount) for services and the low income are paying Y amount and X is an appropriate multiplier for the amount more that they use services, then that is a fair share. I believe that this may still look like regressive taxes when you only look at it from a percentage point of view, just like that idiot Cantor said that the GOP has a mandate by only looking at 53% of independents and 80% of republicans wanting to repeal the health care law and ignoring the democrats at 17% or what the population values are behind those numbers.

But what is at the heart of the Republicans that I talk to is that they think that paying a flat tax *is* enough already and that they should not be responsible for further services. They believe if people are given services that they will choose not to work because they are getting free services. They see the corrupt rather than the needy. They see "redistribution of wealth" instead of reducing crime through better living.

What I see as the solution is getting the numbers out there in ways that they will understand: that health care for all is cheaper than emergency room visits. I can't do anything about the subset that thinks people should be left to die if they aren't willing to take care of themselves, but at least things can be tackled from a "money saving" view point. And the information has to get out there repeatedly. I know you showed me the numbers once and now I once again have no idea where to pull them from.

Republicans are getting spoon fed every day from FOX news that Democrats want to take their money, that they aren't tough on terrorism when they want to cut the frivolous spending and cronyism in the military budget, that they are "hurting America" when Republicans are called out for racism or incorrectly citing "free speech" when they don't understand it is free speech to tell them they are being racist. The ONLY way to counter that is to tell them their fallacies every day.

So back to my original point which is you aren't possibly going to get the idea of a fair share into Republican minds (which is really where it has to be to get it) until the wealth redistribution fear trains are derailed. Sorry for ranting a bit.

To hell with fairness, or helping the poor, or keeping them from rioting and tearing apart the fabric of our culture, or paying "fair shares". These are all issues you can argue about, and there are legitimate points on both sides.

But these are minor issues compared to the fact that extreme concentrations of wealth are incompatible with democracy. When the hundred riches Americans could fund the entire 2010 campaign season out of their paychecks and still have money left over, you've got a problem that goes way beyond "fairness".

Welcome to plutocracy. Yeah the liberals want to, and need to, take away the conservative's money. But the important target isn't the successful small business person or the well-paid middle manager, who are the bulk of the conservative constituency. It's the ultra-rich -- the kings of the world -- that we really need to deal with.

Do you have an answer for how much is enough to take away? Unless some kind of base number can be come up with, Fox is still going to be able to feed them that Obama is a socialist president. Yep, that's what they actually believe. The only lower limit I can give is that I'd like to see CEO salaries rolled back to 1980s single digit multipliers, not the triple digits that they are today.

Also, thank you for the link. I will definitely read it.

I don't have numbers, nor do I have the basis to develop them. But in terms of trying to avoid a plutocracy, I can tell you two things:
- They will need to be relative to the median or average income, because it's the relative differences rather than the absolute numbers that create the distortions and concentrations of power that worry me.
- Starting from where we are now, they would have to be a LOT. Far more than the plutocrats would sit still for, unless we could somehow strip them of their political footsoldiers (i.e. lower-middle class red state conservatives).

My main point in bringing this up is to suggest that we need to point the discussion in a different direction. Rather than focusing on the heartbreaking plight of the poor, or on abstract issues like fairness, we need to focus on danger that these ultra-rich folks pose to our political process. And if you want to bring fairness into the equation, focus on why these folks have done so well while so many are suffering; specifically, demolish the myth that the current crop of ultra-rich have in any way done anything to deserve their wealth. The vast majority of them have gotten rich by looting the commons, in one form or another.

I think that as long as liberals continue to pursue their traditional lines of discussion, they will fail politically. If the message can be turned around to focus on ill-gotten wealth of the elite -- if the red state citizens can see that they have been throwing political support behind those who seek to impoverish them -- then maybe we can see some change.

Indeed. This is my normal method of attack: the wealthy have gotten rich by eliminating jobs and benefits and putting the pay checks in their own pockets.

You can't actually quantify your use of government services.

If you have a lucrative job as a banker, or surgeon, or factory owner, then you benefit tremendously, in ways that can't be easily measured, from the entire history of government providing infrastructure to move goods and people around, police and a court system to ensure property rights are enforcable, and even the "burdensome regulations" on businesses that ensures that buyers in the market generally trust that your new product is not likely to be dangerously defective.

I'm also happy to make the argument for certain specific policies on the direct grounds of cost savings. I believe in cost-benefit analysis, and ensuring that those services we get through the gov't are provided in the most efficient manner possible; we should not tax one more dollar than we need to get the services we've decided on.

But I also think that at a fundamental level, Americans currently want more services than can ever be funded with the tax structure we currently have, and we need to get politicians to stop reflexively acting as though all tax rates, on anything, are always too high and must be cut. (Of course, I've seen polling in the last year saying that the majority of Americans actually already think the rich are undertaxed -- there is a substantial majority in favor of continuing current tax rates for the bottom 98%, but not spending the $700B it would take to fund continuation of the top 2% cuts. It was appalling political stupidity of the Democrats not to force a vote on that policy.) I don't necessarily expect to get through to the hardest-core of Republicans, but clearly there is a large swath of independents and moderate-to-conservative Democrats who are open to the idea that corporate and rich-person loopholes need closing, and that economic performance under Clinton shows that his tax rates didn't destroy the economy.

Whew - 100% of precincts reported - and Kamala maintained her late lead, by just 0.2 percent.

I'm pretty upset about 20, myself.