link to the story of the purple tricycle.

10 june 2003 tuesday

Things that no one seems to be paying (enough) attention to that desperately need (more) attention paid them: a stream-of-consciousness and mutable list brought to you by pondering gerrymandering yesterday.

I started to write explanations for these but realized I'd better keep 'em short or we all shall drown.

  • Gerrymandering "safe" districts for incumbents. Someone(s) other than the legislators affected (or any other politicians, for that matter) need(s) to be in charge of the redrawing of election districts, OR put rules in place to control how they are allowed to do it. somehow.

  • Ok, some people are paying attention to this one: surely there must be a way to get everyone at least a basic level of health care, sustainably? 300 million people in this country, someone has to be able to figure it out. Getting it set up will, I admit, be difficult.

  • The immigration "system" that isn't. Can we please DEAL WITH the fact that we have (at least in the Southwest, and increasingly elsewhere) a lot of illegal immigrants doing a lot of our work for us, and either enforce current laws and punish the EMPLOYERS, or (preferably) recognize the way our economy is working now and revamp the entire system to make it easier for hardworking people to be legal? I admit I need to know more about current immigration law and practice, ...

  • ...but that's another point of this whole entry: the media would rather talk about celebrities and watch live freeway chases than try to educate their viewers about important current issues ...

  • ...because those who still watch TV would rather hear about celebrities and watch live freeway chases; education about important current issues is boring and challenging ...

    aargh.

    I think I heard there's a proposal up to allow California cities and counties to assess income taxes. This is because Proposition 13, back in 1978, capped property tax increases at 2% per year while the property remains in the same hands (reassessment possible upon transfers/sales). This was good, because it mostly stopped fixed-income elders from losing their houses. But it also starved localities of their previous sources of revenue. Schools, for example, have suffered ever since. Localities have generally been forced to rely on sales taxes, which leads to encouraging lots of consumer retail development.

    I would like to get rid of regressive things like sales taxes, and just concentrate on income taxes. As taxes go, they seem like the fairest -- if you make money, you pay tax on it; you earn more or less, you pay more or less. If you are benefiting from the way your society is currently working, you probably earn more, and thus you give back more. If you are not benefiting as much, and earn less, you pay less.

    I understand perfectly well that paying taxes is no fun. But taxes are literally the price we pay to live in one of the better-functioning civilizations in the history of humanity. A balance must be kept, certainly, between what government does and what individuals do, but it seems to me we're slipping too far down the no-taxes slope. Just imagine what things could be like if a slightly higher level of income taxes were collected fairly from everyone:

  • Los Angeles might be able to develop a police force that actually had a reasonable number of officers sufficient to patrol the vast and populated spread of all areas of the city. Just think: what if they were able to really challenge the gangs, in all areas? Wouldn't you be willing to pay a little more for everyone in the region to feel so much safer? If the basic humanity angle doesn't convince you, just think what a region of happy people could do for the economy by celebrating without fear.

    [ok, I know some people are afraid of the LAPD too, but that is a separate issue from needing more personpower to patrol effectively. Assume sufficient oversight and good behavior. I would trust Chief Bratton to handle this pretty well, from interviews I've seen.]

  • We might be able to FIX THE SCHOOLS ALREADY. Teachers need to get paid their worth, and kids need to get books, and art and music and dance and drama and meaningful exercise classes to go along with solid reading 'riting and 'rithmetic classes conducted in functional, clean buildings adjoining grassy fields. Just think what a generation of fully educated children could grow up to do within all communities.

    Of course governments entrusted with money can easily veer to corruption and inefficiency. But there are certain things that can just be best and most fairly handled by governments. The problems with governments handling money will not be fixed by starving them of the funds. That's the easy, wimpy way. The hard, better way is for all of the people to watch what their representatives are doing, kick 'em out if they're doing it badly, and put better people in.

    In other words, the key, the root of all, is that EVERYONE NEEDS TO PAY ATTENTION, do their homework, and act on it. Myself, despite my current lack of complete economic freedom, I'd be happy to pay some more taxes than I do now in order to help make the above things better.

    I need to pay attention and do my homework, more, myself. I want to do something big and helpful, but I'm not sure what/how.

    2:35 pm

    Hah. Who'd have thought that I would agree with the governor of Alabama, a "teetotaling, Bible-quoting businessman from rural central Alabama," a former Republican congressman, about taxes? In the abovelinked NYT op-ed I just found, the second paragraph sums it up: "Governor [Bob] Riley has stunned many of his conservative supporters, and enraged the state's powerful farm and timber lobbies, by pushing a tax reform plan through the Alabama Legislature that shifts a significant amount of the state's tax burden from the poor to wealthy individuals and corporations. And he has framed the issue in starkly moral terms, arguing that the current Alabama tax system violates biblical teachings because Christians are prohibited from oppressing the poor."

    Hah!

    There you are. Honesty. As in, not hypocrisy. And meaning what you say. And paying attention to the tenets of the beliefs you publicly espouse. "John Giles, [president of the Christian Coalition of Alabama], had trouble pointing to a biblical passage that directly supported his opposition to new taxes, but he referred to Jesus' statement about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's. The key question, he argued, is, 'How much is Caesar's?'"

    Seems to me that's a topic the moneychangers could have been discussing right before Jesus threw them all bodily out of the temple. But that's just me.

    For all I know, this is the only issue in which I would support Governor Bob Riley of Alabama, yet I salute him; that one thing has now made my day. Take that and chew on it, all ye who worship Bush-style tax cuts as your religion.

    [here is the NYTimes op-ed, reprinted, just in case the nytimes link ever stops working or in case you don't want to do the nyt's registration - 8 aug 03]


    copyright 2003 carrie lynn king. perspective.