A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

Liberal Media: Tax Cut Edition

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Liberal media, my ass. Here is the AP framing the story of the tax cut vote incorrectly. Bush and the Congress at the time passed taxed cut legislation in 2001 that expires this January. That’s the law. It’s going to expire. Nobody has to do anything. If new legislation is not passed, those cuts will expire. That’s how the law was designed due to deficit concerns.

The House and most Senate Democrats voted for legislation that would enact new tax cuts that would replace the expiring ones beginning in 2011 for everybody to the extent of their first $250,000 of income or so. A minority of Republicans and a few Democrats has filibustered the majority to prevent those new tax cuts from being enacted.

Now, look at how the AP frames it. The headline says: “Republicans block Democratic tax plan on upper incomes.” Sounds like the Democrats are trying to impose a tax on upper incomes, right? Well, no. That’s the effect of the prior legislation, designed to expire not the new plan.

The first sentence says:

Senate Republicans blocked legislation Saturday to let upper-income tax cuts expire on Jan. 1, a showdown scripted by Democrats eager to showcase GOP lawmakers as defenders of millionaires.

Again, no. Legislation to let those tax cuts expire on January 1st, 2011 was passed ten years ago. Mainly by Republicans. If they didn’t want to raise taxes, they should have made the tax cuts permanent 10 years ago. But, they didn’t want to come clean at the time about the huge hole the tax cut plan put in the budget. Now they’re willing to go to the wall blocking tax cuts for everybody’s first $250k in an effort to get concessions for those few Americans who have income in excess of that amount. Incidentally, that concern about the deficit seems to have disappeared – as it does whenever military expenditures or farm subsidies come up.

FSSA Loses Welfare Eligibility Determination Case

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I’ve made the argument before that a cumbersome, error-ridden eligibility determination process for state welfare benefits is seen by the current administration as more of a feature than a bug. ACLU-Indiana just won a battle against that sort of error-by-design. They successfully challenged FSSA’s practice of sending denial letters based on non-cooperation that fail to specify which document(s) the applicant supposedly did not provide.

It’s certainly not hard to imagine the FSSA spitting out a form letter in error that just says generally, “you failed to provide all of the necessary documentation.” Then, when the applicant tries to protest, he or she cannot point to the specific document that caused (or allegedly caused) the denial.

One of FSSA’s defenses was that there was a telephone number where you could call to ask about what the problem was. Rumor has it that telephone number required long waits and frequently kicked off people on hold. That didn’t cut it with the Court of Appeals that said due process requires the FSSA to provide denied applicants with some specifics about why they were being denied.

Gov. Daniels versus the State on Education

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Nikki Kelly has an article in the Journal Gazette contrasting some of Gov. Daniels education priorities with a recent poll on the public’s preferences for education.

Much as I like needling Gov. Daniels, I’m also skeptical of the value of polls on people’s policy preferences. People who are smart enough in their own areas of expertise don’t necessarily have the time or inclination to be informed on details of government policy.

But, for whatever it’s worth, people favor financing struggling schools more generously than those with rapid population growth. Gov. Daniels goes the opposite direction. Coincidentally, I’m sure, older schools with more challenging student populations tend to be in areas that are more likely to vote for the Democrats. Schools in high growth areas tend to have more children of affluent people who are more likely to vote for Gov. Daniels.

People think parental involvement is more important than changes like paying teachers more. Gov. Daniels says you can’t mandate parental involvement. He’s mostly right with that, but I’d say policies he favors that put downward pressure on wages contribute to the lack of parental involvement. It’s simply tougher for parents to be involved where you need two incomes to support the family instead of being able to have one parent at home.

The last item said that the public favors, by a 2-to-1 margin, supporting current schools rather than creating more charter schools. I tend to chalk up continued support for charter schools – in the face of evidence that, on the whole, they don’t perform notably better than traditional schools – to a love of union busting.

Senate Minority Pledges to Block Tax Cuts

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The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill cutting taxes for the portion of a household’s income that is less than $250,000. However, the minority Senate Republicans have promised to filibuster the measure because, if the very wealthy don’t get to keep more of their income in excess of $250,000, apparently the rest of us can go pound sand.

And, it’s not like we’re talking about Nixon or Eisenhower era levels of taxation; it would be a return to Clinton-era tax levels. As I recall, people were doing fairly well through that period. Given the expense of the tax cuts for the wealthy, it’s pretty clear that the posturing on the deficit by those calling for extending tax cuts for income above $250k is just for show.

A couple of other items – I found it remarkable that Republicans were complaining that this hurt the spirit of bipartisanship; a spirit, that near as I can see, has been dead and buried since Obama took office; perhaps since sometime during Dubya’s first term. We saw that Obama’s misguided efforts at bipartisanship during the healthcare debate got him exactly nowhere.

The article also notes Obama’s tendency to bid against himself in negotiations. He gives up stuff as a gesture of good will without demanding concessions in return. I think pretty much any negotiator would tell you that all this does is move the mid-point of a potential settlement in favor of your adversary. At least that’s been my experience in negotiating settlements in civil suits.

There is also a prisoner’s dilemma dynamic going on in D.C. these days. If both sides are “good,” both get rewarded a little. If both sides are “bad,” then both get penalized a little bit. But, if one side is “good” and the other side is “bad,” then the bad side gets rewarded a lot and the good side gets penalized a lot. Obama extending his hand to people who routinely smack it away just makes him look like a chump. The rational way to play the game is to be nice at first, but if the other guy pounds you, you pound him back until he starts playing nice, then you play nice too.

Holiday Season is Sweatshop Season at LSA

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Maureen Hayden, writing for CNHI, has an article on bill requests being made by legislators and being drafted by employees at Indiana’s Legislative Services Agency (LSA). She reports that there have been about 900 bill requests so far this session.

I used to work for LSA back in ’96 – ’99. Ms. Hayden reports that LSA currently consists of “about 80 lawyers, fiscal analysts and support staff.” Most of the bill requests are drafted by the lawyers in the section of LSA called the Office of Bill Drafting and Research (OBDAR). There were 18 of us when I was in that office. The lawyers had fiscal analyst counterparts in the Office of Fiscal Management and Analysis (OFMA). The fiscal analyst provides a report on the fiscal impact of a given piece of legislation. A third branch of LSA is the Office of Code Revision. After my stint at OBDAR, I became a deputy director at OCR. Our job, during session, was to edit the bill drafts submitted by the OBDAR attorneys.

The way it worked was, a legislator would come in and meet with the director of OBDAR and tell him what he or she wanted, generally, in terms of legislation. The director summarized the request and assigned it to a bill drafting attorney. (I don’t know how, exactly, the OFMA analysts got assigned, but there was a corresponding assignment to a fiscal analyst.) The drafting attorney would, in a lot of cases, just draft the bill without having to do a lot of extra research. A good chunk of these bills are simply repeats of requests from prior years. A fair number of others are pretty basic — e.g., change the speed limit from 65 to 70 mph. But, there are still plenty of requests that are complicated.

For the complicated ones, you work out the questions that need to be answered, and try to get in touch with the requesting legislator. This can be a challenge – these folks are very busy. Then, you have to get the legislator to slow down enough to pay attention to the, usually boring, details of the issues you need to work through. A lot of legislators are frenetic, big picture types — not generally inclined to put everything on hold to really bear down on niggling details.

A lot of times, lobbyists are involved – either the legislator is carrying water for a particular group or that group is a trusted source of information and policy advice for the legislator. So, you’ll have to talk with those folks. Not uncommonly, you’ll get a draft piece of legislation that has originated with the lobbying group. Often, these drafts are horrible messes that don’t really pin down who gets to do what to whom and under what circumstances. They require an extra step. Before you can get to work, you have to discern what these drafts are actually trying to accomplish. Only then can get to work on drafting language that actually accomplishes the goal.

Because of the legislative calendar, the bulk of bill drafting season coincides with the holiday season. Elections take place in early November. Legislators get organized through early November. Bill requests really get going in the latter half of November. What’s really fun is when a legislator pops into LSA on his way to the airport in Indy to drop off a pile of bill requests before he or she flies off to a Christmas vacation some place warm with the family. Anyway, you end up with long days and nights of drafting through the end of November all of December and into January before the General Assembly kicks into gear the first or second week of the new year.

The good folks at LSA are a little like legislative elves, slaving away in Santa’s sweatshop, churning out bills for good little representatives and senators to introduce at the beginning of the session.

As for the number of bills produced, from talking with folks who have been at LSA for a long time, it seems that the number is essentially a function of the technological ability to produce the documents. It used to be that setting the type and producing the paper was more of a barrier to creating bills. With word processing and reproduction getting easier and easier, that has allowed the number of bills to increase over thee years.

State Lawmakers Look to Cut Medicaid

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Ken Kusmer, writing for the AP, has an article indicating that state lawmakers are looking to cut Medicaid benefits in the upcoming session. This makes sense, since it’s a huge part of the budget. However, the noises some are making about opting out of Medicaid strike me as just so much grandstanding.

The federal government picks up about 2/3 of the tab for our state’s Medicaid program. That money comes with a lot of strings attached about what services you have to offer and to whom as part of your Medicaid program. I’m sure those strings chafe a little, but if you want to provide medical services to poor people in your state (a big “if,” I suppose in some quarters), then you just have to put up with the red tape if your money is getting matched 2-to-1.

As Sen. Kenley says, Medicaid is the elephant in the room. It’s very expensive, because health care is very expensive. Medicaid is getting more expensive, because Indiana – contrary to the assertions of a certain Indiana state Governor – is not on an economic “hot streak” and is not an “island of growth.” The economy is tough, people are getting poorer, and they are becoming eligible for Medicaid.

One thing that raised a flag for me, however, was that a lot of this discussion seems to be driven by some projections put together by FSSA in reaction to the national health care reform bill. Gov. Daniels opposition to health care reform has a very significant political component to it, and I would take projections on the legislation from his agencies with a grain of salt, if not an entire salt lick.

I agree that we have to work to keep medical costs under control. Spiraling health care costs seem to be a parasite, sucking the life out of our economy. Health care is killing us, as it were. But, if all we have is opposing national health care reform and opting out of Medicaid, what we’re left with is “don’t get sick, and if you do, die quickly.”

We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven

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(With apologies to Lord Tennyson for the title.)

The Indiana School Superintendent sent out a memo indicating that no state funding cuts are expected for K-12 education in 2011 as compared to 2010. Mikel Livingston, reporting for the Lafayette Journal & Courier reported on that memo, along with a story discussing how financial problems have hit Tippecanoe School Corporation especially hard.

Because of last year’s state cuts and its own budget problems, TSC has increased class size – by about 37% in the class cited by the article; and has cut art and music instructional time in half.

When I read about our struggle to maintain funding for something as basic as education, it’s hard not to worry that we are a society in decline. Cutting education is like eating your seed corn; you just don’t do it unless there aren’t any other options. In the past, we, as a society, were able to be productive enough to have the resources to educate our children at a certain level. It seems to me like our ability to fund schools has been stagnant or in decline for at least a decade; and it does not appear that any return to vigor in that area is likely in the near future.

Of course, it could be that we are still productive enough, but the fruits of that productivity are accumulating elsewhere. But, I’ve been advised, that suggesting such things is class warfare and irresponsible.

Kids These Days Are Smarter, More Industrious, and Listen to Better Music

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George Will (h/t Paul Roales) has a brief history of the “coarsening” of kids’ culture in the 20th century. He attempts to pin that particular tail on “progressives,” but that part of his undertaking is clumsy and doesn’t much work.

What it does show is that efforts to censor popular culture because it’s corrupting the children comes off looking pretty stupid in retrospect: comic books and Elvis, oh my!

I’ve mentioned this before — I’ve been doing this for six years, there is going to be some repetition — but generation after generation seems to think that the next generation is lazier, dumber, and has worse taste in popular culture than they did. Unless you subscribe to the notion that humanity has been in steady decline since it was kicked out of Eden, this is at least a little ridiculous. We’ve come a long way since we were competing with Neanderthals for supremacy. Somewhere in there, a generation or two must have had better music than its predecessor.

Whenever I see an article or column in the “kids these days” genre, it gets me to rolling my eyes.

AP Warns of Backlash Against Republicans Pursuing Social Issues

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The AP has an article warning Republicans across the country that there might be a backlash if they pursue social issues. I guess the warning isn’t technically from the AP; the author stuck the fact in someone’s mouth when writing the article, so I guess that makes it a news piece. But, I have a hard time believing the author couldn’t have found a person willing to say there would be a backlash if they didn’t pursue social issues.

Anyway, the premise of the article is that voters voted for Republicans because of economic issues and they pursue social issues at their own peril. That might be true. In fact, I suspect it is true, but the article seems weird as a news piece instead of an opinion piece.

Anyway, I expect the temptation to go to the social legislation bag of tricks will prove irresistable. Economic solutions are difficult, painful, complicated, and unlikely to be rewarded by voters. Social issues are emotional and immediate, even if divisive. Social issue solutions don’t need to be effective to be popular in some quarters. (See, e.g., ‘abstinence only’ education’s ineffectiveness.) And they’re easy to talk about on the campaign trail. Try talking about homestead replacement credits, and watch eyes glaze over. Talk about how They are taking away Our country and how it’s time to Fight Back, and suddenly you’re William Wallace in Braveheart.

A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Time Zones Entirely

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Justin Graham, writing for the Evansville Courier Press, has a column explaining why, as a matter of geometry, it’s ridiculous for Indiana to be on Eastern Time. If you have 24 equal, one hour time zones and if the time zones use Greenwich England (for arbitrary historical reasons) as the starting point, then the boundary between Eastern and Central should be somewhere near Mansfield, Ohio.

But, I might suggest that we’re getting close to the time when it’s appropriate to do without time zones entirely. We’ve been adjusting our relationship to our clocks and the time of day as technology progresses. Before railroads and telegraphs, there was no need or ability to coordinate your efforts with any great precision with people who were very distant from you. Communications couldn’t travel much faster than the sun. With railroads and telegraphs, the ability and need increased a bit; but there was no need to coordinate much beyond the 750 mile width of a time zone.

But now, we are becoming increasingly connected with those around the world. It’s not at all unusual to work with people around the world. It might be time to put the world on a single standard time. The fact that Terre Haute is part of a time zone that should end at Mansfield shows we’re no longer too concerned with having 12:00 hours associated with the sun being directly overhead. In for a penny, in for a pound, maybe we should all go to Coordinated Universal Time.