So for the first time (given my newfound citizenship) I’m going to get to vote in the elections this fall. I’m going to do the personally risky thing of talking about my thought process regarding the ballot — this is very risky because it will alienate anyone who doesn’t agree with me, which is probably everyone. But I’m doing this because I’m curious if anyone can legitimately help. What I’d really love to see is some sort of quantitative analysis of certain things. My dream is an analysis of candidates who come from a business or non-political background* and how their job performance was as governor, specifically with respect to the budget. You would intuitively think that businesspeople would be more likely to balance the budget, but I don’t know that that’s true. I am considering doing a study myself, but it would save me lots of time if it already existed. I’d also love any other quant studies (e.g. Democrat vs Republican performance on the budget, 3rd party performance versus political extremity of future elections (do D/R candidates become more L/C in the future in reaction to extremist 3rd parties doing well)) that can possibly be unearthed. Anyway, let me start by talking about what I believe.
* — Did you know that 57 senators are lawyers (i.e. have JD’s)? It’s true.
First, it’s worth noting that I think government is a lot less important than most people do — I think it affects people’s lives a lot less than most people seem to think, contributing perhaps 1% of the variance in your happiness. Off the top of my head, I’d say that personal choices are like 30% or so, leaving the remaining 69% to things that are essentially luck, but I’m less confident in those numbers. At any rate, I don’t think the identity of elected officials or results of ballot propositions are really that important. This note is kind of irrelevant, of course, since it doesn’t really affect what the right decision is (and I find voting fun so I’m always going to vote even if it’s not a high priority).
My political philosophy, like most other things in my life, is grounded in economics. I don’t care too much about social issues except insofar as they set up an incentive structure for things that are societally beneficial. For instance, I am strongly in favor of an extensive death penalty with a limited appeals process — the current death penalty is so hamstrung and expensive as to be useless, but if we had a functional, wide-ranging one, I think it would be a drastic reduction in crime at the cost of merely a few innocent lives. (I am aware of the counterarguments, many very good ones, but this isn’t on the ballot anyway so let’s not argue about it now.)
The #1 thing, by far, that informs my voting decisions is the budget, specifically balancing it, which unfortunately is kind of a pipe dream: it seems like practically speaking, Democrats raise spending without raising taxes, and Republicans cut taxes without cutting spending, so both parties seem to bring us into quite a fiscal morass. I place a lot of this blame, to be sure, on the voters: campaign attack ads (which presumably “work”) involve Republicans accusing Democrats of wanting to raise taxes and Democrats accusing Republicans of wanting to cut spending. And there’s direct evidence as well, such as California’s legendarily stupid propositions (most notably Proposition 13 which essentially prevents property taxes from being inflation-adjusted), that voters want to have their cake and eat it too. I guess this isn’t a surprise given how many Americans have credit card debt of their own.
Anyway, most of the time I vote in whatever way I think will help balance the budget. I do make exceptions sometimes, as you will see below — I do think that it’s also reasonable for voters to vote selfishly, and to legislate the will of the people by having each voter vote for what will improve their life the most (in principle, there might be some non-normality in the happiness-delta distribution — again, I would love to see a quant study on this.) Unfortunately, in most cases, all roads lead to a giant budget gap.
On other issues, I’m generically socially liberal except for the death penalty thing and a couple other things (e.g. I think some things should be paternalistically forbidden, like alcohol advertising on TV and garish billboards within sight of the freeway — studies have shown that this slows traffic down and leads to less safe driving). I guess I’m basically a utilitarian when it comes down to it — if something hurts people at largeit should generally be forbidden, and if something doesn’t, it should generally be allowed. Anyway, now you know where I’m coming from. Here’s the ballot.
Governor: Meg Whitman vs. Jerry Brown: This is a tough one. After seeing a Brown ad where he promised no new taxes without voter approval (good luck getting the voters to approve that, guy), I was convinced to vote for Whitman. But then I saw a Whitman ad castigating Brown for raising taxes, which swayed me back towards Brown! I’m still on the fence here, hence the request for an empirical study above. Can anyone at least provide a link to California’s budget relative to the rest of the country over the years, in particular including Brown’s years as governor?
Senate: Carly Fiorina vs. Barbara Boxer: Easy one in my mind to vote for Boxer. Obama has done a good job, but stuff still needs to be done (again, budget). If we have a Republican senate and a Democratic president, nothing will get done. I think America is still in bad enough shape that it’s worth rolling the dice on stuff getting done as opposed to effecting a situation where nothing gets done. If we had a remotely competent Republican president, I’d probably vote for the Republican here. (Boxer is a loyal D for most intents and purposes, so this really is a vote for Obama, though Fiorina is unlikely to be a loyal R.)
Prop 19, Marijuana: An inconsistent with my philosophy vote here, insofar that a yes vote would be budgetary and I plan to vote no. I just really, really hate the smell of marijuana (and the smoke) and my life would be negatively affected if I smelled it even more frequently in public. A purely selfish vote, but this is one of few government things that would have a direct effect on my life.
Props 20/27, redistricting: Prop 27 would get rid of the commission for redistricting at the state level, while Prop 20 would increase their power to also redistrict congressional districts. You can make a legitimate argument that gerrymandering is efficient: it (perhaps) results in the same D/R power breakdown while saving society a large cost in terms of campaigning time and money. So I don’t know that I’m against gerrymandering (and yes, there are arguments on the other side). I’m just going to vote no on both of these since when in doubt, the people shouldn’t be in charge of decisions.
Prop 21, +tax increase to fund state parks: These “to fund state parks” things are huge crocks: earmarks just result in discretionary funding being redistributed. Oldest trick in the proposition book. That said, it is a tax increase, so I am voting yes.
Prop 22, prevents the state from borrowing funds used for various things: Option value is always a good thing. This kinda sounds like a knee-jerk reaction, a classic thing the voters would get wrong. I am voting no.
Prop 23, suspends clean energy requirements: Probably another deviation from the single-issue budget thing, but I do care about this particular thing. So voting no.
Prop 24, raises taxes on businesses: This seems to be a tax increase, so voting yes, but I’m not entirely convinced about it — it repeals a legislative decision and I’m always nervous about that.
Prop 25, requires only a simple majority for a budget: This is a scary proposition because it maintains a 2/3 voting requirement for taxes. So you’re in a position where you can pass a budget with only 50-50, but if you raise taxes, you need 2/3. This will make it easier to pass budgets with no tax increases. On the other hand, it will make things more efficient by only requiring half — or will it? You still have to find the 50/50 point, which maybe takes just as much time. Close, but I think I’m voting no.
Prop 26, requires 2/3 vote to pass certain fees: Easy no vote, don’t want to make it harder to raise taxes.
October 21, 2010 at 2:17 pm |
I suspect that most people who care as much as you do conclude that it’s more important to spend marginal effort getting other people to vote your way on the top 1 or 2 lines than to spend analytical effort to get every decision on the ballot abstractly optimal.
October 21, 2010 at 2:26 pm |
second comment:
“My dream is an analysis of candidates who come from a business or non-political background* and how their job performance was as governor, specifically with respect to the budget.”
A challenge here would be that a lot of the budget (both revenue and expense side) is dependent on macro conditions for which the governor can’t necessairly take credit or blame:
- tax receipts are up because we’re in a housing bubble
- tax receipts are down because the army closed a big base
- head start expenses are up because the feds subsidize it 50% less this year
- global warming caused a terrible harvest in Salinas this year
You really want some way of separating out what’s in the direct control of the party being evaluated, and when it comes to positions which are largely about “leadership”, it’s hard to be quantitative in such an analysis.
October 21, 2010 at 2:36 pm |
Ideally, the data are textured and numerous enough that a multi-regression analysis will work that stuff out, but I agree that this is kind of a pipe dream. Solution: we need more states. (Putting in dummy variables for each year would be a start, as it should encompass many of the things you mention and other national variables.)
October 22, 2010 at 4:32 am |
You really think we should use the government’s monopoloy on violence to punish people who make a smell you don’t like? Seriously?
October 23, 2010 at 8:43 pm |
I’d like to point out the obvious–if you are going to make budget balancing the sole issue on which you base your vote, you had better be pretty damn sure that budget balancing is, in fact, the most important policy issue faced by the government. Not only is the importance of budget balancing far from self-evident, it’s not even clear that budget balancing is even desirable. In fact, as I’m sure you are aware, Keynesian economics says that running a deficit right now is actually a good thing. See the last N of Krugman’s columns for numerous non-technical explanations of this. Again, I gather that you totally disagree with Krugman, but you must be pretty damn sure of your own analysis to believe that this is the #1 issue in America.
On a related note, I don’t think it’s fair to say that Democrats increase spending without raising taxes while Republicans lower taxes without decreasing spending, for a few reasons. First, as stated above, the Democratic willingness to spend during a recession without raising taxes is at least based on reasonable (if arguable) thinking in the form of a Keynesian economics. Republican willingness to decrease taxes without decreasing spending is only based on voodoo economics, which is a total joke. Basically, the “theorem” seems to be that any decrease in taxes must produce an increase in revenues. And let’s look at the recent history of budgetary responsibility. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, we had a huge expansion, which led to budget surpluses. Of course, these surpluses were not caused by Clinton, but these surpluses were partly used to pay down the debt rather than simply given away in tax breaks. Meanwhile, Clinton famously made welfare cuts rather than expanding entitlements. Compare that to Bush, who both cut taxes and raised spending in the form of Medicare Part D and two semi-permanent wars. This was over a period that included both recession and expansion.
Caveat: Things are a bit different at the state level. From what little I know, California has been fiscally irresponsible in both good times and bad, and they can’t issue US Treasuries to finance deficits. They have to issue state bonds instead. Nor are they managing their own economy. For these reasons, budget balancing is a reasonable thing to desire at the state level.
Okay, with that out of the way, let’s play your little game. As was pointed out by someone else, having a balanced budget has more to do with how the economy is doing than anything else. You express hope that this variable could be removed with some regression analysis or something (only in theory, of course), but I doubt that’s possible. When one variable dominates so much, everything else is just going to be noise, isn’t it?
Regarding Jerry Brown, if *you* wanted to be governor and you wanted to raise taxes *and* you wanted to be honest about it, I’m not sure what else you could say. You can either lie to get elected, say you’re going to raise taxes and definitely not get elected, or you could say what Jerry Brown said, which seems like the honorable way out. Meanwhile, it seems clear that Whitman has no interest in raising taxes.
Regarding Boxer vs Fiorina, it’s not always true that doing something is better than nothing, if the something is awful.
Other stuff: I’ve run out of steam.
October 23, 2010 at 11:07 pm |
Yes, I disagree with Krugman. Debt is good. Deficit is bad.
Bush was the worst [fiscal] president ever, for sure. Well, there’s probably a Fillmore or a Hayes or something way back when our economy was based on corn and smallpox. Clinton/Bush is a strawman anyway — those people have little if anything to do with Brown/Whitman (Clinton in particular was unquestionably more fiscally conservative than Bush — Clinton is by far the best president since at least Nixon.)
I don’t understand how Brown’s line is good in any case — either he’s lying and he’ll pass tax increases, or he’s not lying in which case he won’t because the voters won’t go for it, as evidenced by the fact that he can’t say he’ll raise taxes. I hope he’s lying to get elected, because it looks like he’ll get elected.
While you may not believe that trickle-down economics works in our current situation (i.e. that lowering taxes stimulates the economy, increasing revenue), it’s clear that it works at SOME point — if the tax rate was 90% across the board surely you’d think that revenue would be increased by lowering taxes. It’s a question of where the equilibrium lies. I do agree that it’s probably significantly higher than the current settings. (Although, if taxes get raised, it will noticeably increase my incentive to quit my job — I doubt I’m typical, but in my case, raising taxes will hurt my tax revenue for sure, though I probably get replaced and everyone slides up a notch, so it only hurts the economy a small fraction of that.)
I don’t know if this has any academic support, but I tend to believe that recessions are like wildfires — they clean out the least healthy trees (=businesses, jobs, organizations) and provide room for the best trees to grow. It’s painful on an individual level, and I understand voter sentiment and anger, but these things end on their own and I don’t like the idea that we’re supposed to panic because of a couple of shaky years. (The Great Depression is a little different in that the situation with the dust bowl was basically an externality, so there was some seed for it, no pun intended. Also, that gave us the pyramid scheme known as Social Security — even if you think SS is a good thing, it’s the very definition of a pyramid scheme.)
Actually, to be perfectly honest, I feel like things are different enough right now that it’s not clear which if any classical economics is even applicable. It must be a fascinating time to be an economist.
November 27, 2010 at 7:41 am |
“For instance, I am strongly in favor of an extensive death penalty with a limited appeals process — the current death penalty is so hamstrung and expensive as to be useless, but if we had a functional, wide-ranging one, I think it would be a drastic reduction in crime at the cost of merely a few innocent lives. (I am aware of the counterarguments, many very good ones, but this isn’t on the ballot anyway so let’s not argue about it now.)”
I would like to figure out a way to have the “extensive” death penalty you favor, but because of some of the counterarguments (all of which I’m not so certain you’re aware of) I’m still working on that project.
What you don’t seem to be aware of however, is how callously flippant and offensive your reference to “mere” innocent lives comes across. I would argue that as a generally perceptive person, you should have been aware of the offensive potential of such a remark. Perhaps you would argue that you are aware of this too, but simply intended to offend.