The Single Issue Voter

Zeroing in on a single issue sounds good in theory. Be passionate about something, something that you feel is more important than anything else in the whole wide world. Throw all of your support to a candidate that agrees with your issue and refuse to vote for anyone who disagrees. All you have to do is convince more than 50% of voters of the importance of your issue and we're on the road to utopia.

Not so fast, Skippy.

The problem wit being a single issue voter is that our lives are not single issue lives. What's the most important? Abortion rights? The ACA? The candidate's morality? Tax issues? Defense? Immigration? What if all these issues (and more) are equally important? Or even pretty darn important if not as important as issue #1? What if the available candidates include one who agrees with you on issue #1, but not on issues 2, 3, 4...10; and another who disagrees on #1, but agrees on all the others? Most single issue voters will choose the candidate who agrees with them on issue #1.

This is the problem that we are dealing with in the age of Trump. We had a candidate (and now a President) who ran an unquestionably hateful campaign; has been credibly accused of over a dozen women of sexual harassment, even caught on tape admitting to it; lied repeatedly and obviously during the campaign and still does as President; shows no aptitude or competence and makes many statements betraying his ignorance; undermines the press and law enforcement;  is reckless in his discussion of military options...I can go on and on. But what many, many people based their decision on is one issue: abortion. Now I'm not going to argue for or against abortion, choice or any associated issues. But for those who vehemently oppose abortion in all circumstances, nothing else matters.

This is what we are up against when we bring up sexual harassment allegations against Donald Trump and now Roy Moore. To the dyed-in-wool abortion opponents, none of that matters because the other candidate is an abortion supporter. Abortion is their single issue. Nothing else matters and nothing will sway them.  And frankly, we're wasting our time trying to change the minds of people like that. Work on the people who are open to changing their minds.

And get your ass out and vote so that there are more of us than there are of them.

Did Anyone Read This God Damn Bill?

Few would argue that the tax code in the United States isn't in need of reform. Every lobbying group that has a shred of influence has convinced Congress to include exemptions and loopholes. Many of you know that I work for my state's Department of Revenue. I work mainly with sales tax and tax incentives; when I started work there I was stunned at the number exemptions and exceptions and how often the answer to the questions "Is that taxable?" was "It depends". In principle I was for a change to the tax code, but was skeptical that Republicans would make any changes that were helpful to low- and middle-income Americans. I am deeply skeptical that giving tax breaks to the rich and to big corporations is going to translate to more money in the pockets of people like me, even though the Trumpists and the Republicans assure me that they passed a "massive" tax cut that will benefit working Americans. I call "bullshit".

There's a lot wrong with what was just passed:

• The Republicans used suspect math in order to claim that the increase to the deficit and national debt would be under the threshold that allowed them to pass the bill with 51 votes instead of 60. 
•  Any tax reductions will expire in seven years. (This is so the math in the previous bullet point works - they know full well that a future Congress will not want to implement what most Americans will view as a tax increase by letting cuts expire)
• While some middle-income Americans will see lower tax bills (early back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that I am one of them) many more will see increases. 
• The biggest tax reductions affect the richest Americans as well as large corporations (the rationale is the big companies will use their tax windfall to increase wages and create jobs, ignoring the fact that most megacorps are sitting on huge piles of cash and not increasing wages. Wages increase due to market pressure and competition; jobs are created when demand increases)
• The Senate bill was rushed through with little debate and no time to read the bill, let alone understand what was in it (almost 500 pages) - handwritten changes appeared minutes before the vote and changes were made that lobbyists knew before the Democratic party Senators did. 
• Several non-tax related items appeared in the bill including drilling in the Arctic, classifying fetuses as "persons" in the tax code, ending the individual mandate's penalties, repealing the prohibition on non-profit groups from political activism and who the hell knows what else?
• Many Schedule A itemized deductions have been eliminated, while big ticket, 1%er deductions are retained or expanded
• Even though the standard deduction is doubled, personal exemptions are to be eliminated, hurting anyone with more than one child

It's pretty clear that this is not a middle/working class friendly bill, but mainly payback to the donor class. 

Does Elizabeth Warren Have Cherokee Ancestry?

Does Elizabeth Warren have Cherokee ancestors? Probably not, since there doesn't appear to be any documentation to support her belief. Is she lying about it? Also probably not. Families tell stories about their lineage, sometimes it turns out not to be true. I have long noted how there seems to be a huge number of people who, while outwardly white, claim to be part Cherokee. I'm not talking about people who actually know that they're Cherokee because they have actually met that parent or grandparent who is definitely Native American or because they are an enrolled member of one of the three Cherokee nations. No, I'm talking about those who claim an ancestor far enough back that no one living knows for sure: "My great-grandmother was one quarter Cherokee" - this means the actual Cherokee ancestor is five generations back. I personally never met any of my great-grandparents, let alone great-great-great-grandparents. But family lore is hard to deny and people like to tell stories and make their beginnings a bit more exotic. That doesn't mean that those who hear those stories are lying when they pass them on.

In my own family we have our share of undocumented family lore. My two adopted sons, according to their biological grandfather, are part Iroquois. Which nation among the Iroquois Confederacy I have no idea, but we always accepted it and never had a thought of verifying or documenting it. In my own family my Aunt Agnes told me stories about our Italian and South Slav ancestors and even talked about a branch of the family, her own half-siblings, that were still living in what was then Yugoslavia. No documentation until my uncle had a chance meeting with a cousin, the granddaughter of one of the half-siblings, who verified that we were descended from Italians who migrated to the Croatia/Slovenia region and Aunt Agnes' tales were proven true.

My point is that families tell stories about themselves and believing and repeating those stories doesn't make you a liar or a bad person. Elizabeth Warren isn't the problem here, it's a President who feels empowered to demean anyone who stands up to him and hasn't a clue about how to act like the representative of all the people.

Pocahontas? Again? Really?

Is "Pocahontas" a racial slur? I have no idea, but I have seen articles claiming that it is, and others claiming that it isn't. I've also seen Trump supporters rationalize that since Trump doesn't believe Warren's claim that she has Native American ancestry, he is not mocking Natives, he is mocking Warren for claiming to be Native. Is Elizabeth Warren part Cherokee? I don't know. She bases her claim on stories her parents and grandparents told her, but has no documentation. She is, however, one of untold apparently white Americans who claim to be part Cherokee. I'll let actual Native Americans decide if calling someone "Pocahontas" is a slur, but Trump undoubtedly means it as an insult, like all his other schoolyard nicknames like "Lyin' Ted", "Low-Energy Jeb" or "Liddle Bob Corker" and even "Rocket Man". What is a certainty is that bringing it into the ceremony honoring the Navajo Code Talkers was extremely inappropriate. Even his supposed words of respect were rambling and apparently not thought through: "You're very, very, special people. You were here long before any of us here". What? Then he segues into his insult: "We have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago..." Huh? We know in retrospect that he's talking about Senator Warren, "they" say? They say she was here "a long time ago" What the hell is he babbling about? "They call her Pocahontas"...no sir, you call her Pocahontas. You know that this couldn't have been part of his scripted remarks, it was one of his stream of consciousness idiotic ramblings. He somehow thought it was appropriate, since was honoring Indians, that he work in a poke to an opponent using the name of an historic Indian.

Even if this wasn't a racial slur, it was just another in a continual cascade of bad judgement and disrespect. 

The Republican "Tax Reform" Bills

Okay, Congress, fresh from it's cluster-fuck over repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are now working on "reforming" the tax code. So what's in the tax bills? (The House and Senate each have bills which differ from the other)

The main goal of the House's bill was to lower taxes on corporations. The top marginal rate would be lowered from 35 to 20 percent, pass-through corporations (S-Corps aka LLCs) would have a top rate of 25 percent, with a rate of only 9 percent on the first $75,000 (starting in 2022). Despite threats, the House bill does not include a repeal of ACA's individual mandate, although the Senate bill does. Businesses can also repatriate overseas cash assets at a rate of 12 percent. Businesses also will no longer be taxed on revenues earned outside the country. The estate tax is being phased out. According to some analysts, about 40% of American would pay less and 20% would pay more. However, any personal income tax cuts expire in 2023. The number of tax brackets decrease from seven to four. Many credits and deductions are being eliminated, including medical expenses, most college tax benefits, and the personal exemption and replaced with a larger standard deduction.

What I am seeing is that it is unclear exactly how this bill would affect me personally. I do not itemize, so I do not suffer from the loss of deductions. The elimination of personal exemptions for me is an increase of taxable income of $8100, which is more than offset by the doubling of the standard deduction, decreasing my taxable income by about $12,000. However, anyone with a household of more than three is going to lose out with these two changes. Two or less, there is a net benefit. I'm not sure how my business income will be taxed, or if allowable business expenses will change.

Note that the personal reductions expire while the business reductions do not. This is to shoehorn the bill into Senate requirements that the changes net less than a certain amount over a ten year period. The expiration of the personal income tax changes will allow the math to work, but we all know that a future Congress will not want to raise taxes (we've been down this road before), so in reality the costs will exceed the Senate cutoff. Meeting these requirements allows the Senate to pass a bill that is not subject to filibuster and which therefore can be passed with 51 votes (or 50 plus Mike Pence).

Of course the big push is to reduce corporate taxes, allegedly to boost job creation and so that employees can receive raises. In fact, the White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders recently announced that the "average American family" would get a "$4000 raise" from this tax plan, factoring in the ephemeral extra jobs and higher pay rates supposedly on the way. The problem with this is that American corporations, skittish about over-extending since the last recession and housing crash, are sitting on piles of cash that could already be used for investment and increasing wages. In the real world businesses do not create jobs or hand out raises simply because their taxes decrease. Investment, including expansion, happens because there is a greater demand for their product or service; raises happen when there is competition for labor, otherwise companies don't pay any more than they have to.

All in all, this "tax reform" bill appears to be primarily a giveaway for the billionaire class, while being branded as a bonanza for the working Joes and Janes of America.

helpful links:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/the-house-is-voting-on-its-tax-bill-thursday-heres-what-is-in-it/?utm_term=.447ad9e7f537

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/15/us/politics/every-tax-cut-in-the-house-tax-bill.html

Good Guy With a Gun

Assuming what we've heard so far is accurate, Stephen Willeford and Johnnie Langendorff are a brave men. Willeford heard gunshots from the church next door this past Sunday, grabbed his gun and ran toward the gunfire, shooting the man who had just killed 26 people in the church. He and Langendorff then pursued the killer in Langendorff's pickup, running him off the road and then waited until law enforcement arrived. They did what a lot of people like to think that they'd do in a similar situation. Most people believe that they will be heroic in dangerous scenarios, but you never really know what you'll do until you are right in the middle of it. These two stepped up and did what needed to be done. At the same time their actions confirmed what many gun owners believe: that a "good guy with a gun" will neutralize a "bad guy with a gun", and the answer to mass shootings is not to limit or restrict gun ownership, but to expand it, so everyone has a gun. In this case further bloodshed may very well have been prevented, but 26 people still died before the killer was stopped. There still wasn't a happy ending. Perhaps, gun advocates might argue, if someone inside the church was armed, it could have been prevented altogether.

Maybe. There have been other situations where armed bystanders did what most people do: ran and hid. There have been situations where citizens have drawn their guns, causing confusion for law enforcement. And to bring up a sore subject, since black men seem to get shot if the police suspect that they are armed, let alone have drawn a weapon, what happens when the police arrive and find a black "good guy with a gun"?

I don't pretend to know what the answer is. I can guarantee that the answer won't be simple and that nothing can prevent all shootings. But we sure need to talk about finding a solution. We don't even have good data to base a solution on because NRA influence in Congress has caused most research into gun violence to be suppressed. We can pontificate about immigration and "extreme vetting" 10 minutes after a Muslim kills people while shouting "God is great" in Arabic, but it's always too soon to talk about gun legislation.

Part of the problem is the army of strawmen that the NRA and their allies deploy. No one is suggesting repealing the Second Amendment, no one is demanding that the government "come for our guns", no one is suggesting that law-abiding gun owners be punished. Yet this is what many gun owners argue against, when few, if any, legislators are suggesting anything like that.

Mass killings are becoming the new normal. What are we going to do about it? Let's start with recognizing that something needs to be done.

Election Rigging

When I first heard the accusations of election rigging last year, I interpreted "rigging" as something akin to widespread election fraud, election commissioners suborned, voting machines hacked, paper ballots stolen, dead people voting, people voting multiple times, and dismissed the possibility that Secretary Clinton (who was the one who most often was alleged to have rigged the election) had that much power. There is no nation-wide body that oversees elections, but the rules are set by the states and administered locally.  But soon it became apparent that the word "rigged" was used in a much broader sense, making the word effectively meaningless. Sanders supporters threw the word around in the primaries, and it's obvious now if it wasn't obvious then, that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) preferred Clinton, despite their internal rules to remain neutral until a candidate received the party's nomination. But the fact remains that all candidates knew the rules for getting delegates beforehand, and fair or not, Clinton, playing by the rules that were in place, received more delegates than Sanders. (More on that later). During the general election campaign, Candidate Trump began throwing the allegation of rigging around, especially in late September and early October as polls seemed to show that Clinton had the upper hand. Without evidence, he claimed that all the polls were wrong (at least those that showed him behind) and that the election was rigged against him.  Never one to provide specifics when vague generalities will do, he even suggested that it was the media who was doing the rigging. It looked like he was preparing the excuses that he'd use after his election day loss.

But then he won, and you didn't hear anything more from him about election rigging.

Then came Donna Brazile's book where she claims that she had evidence that the Clinton campaign rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders. I read the excerpts from her book that was published by Politico, and despite the fundraising agreement raising numerous red flags, it didn't appear that the information that she was giving supported her conclusion that the primaries were rigged in Clinton's favor. Once again, the word "rigged" being used of any bias, favoritism, or just plain hard-nosed campaigning. It didn't take long for more details to come out casting doubt on Brazile's conclusions, including her statement this morning that the primaries were "a fair fight".

Of course Brazile's book was used by Trump to distract from his own problems with allegations of election rigging; his go-to stratagem is to accuse Clinton of whatever he's being accused of!

In my opinion, Trump's campaign, with Russian assistance, didn't rig the election either. Did Russians spread disinformation? I don't think that's in doubt any longer. Did Russians steal emails from the DNC? Our intelligence agencies believe so. Did the Trump campaign meet with and cooperate with Russians? More and more evidence is pointing that way, and more of them are being caught in lies. But did the Russians, with or without the cooperation of the Trump campaign actually hack into voting machines or cause any votes to be changed? I see no evidence of that either.

So when I hear or see the word "rigged", I tend to ignore it, because it's become a word without real meaning in popular usage.