Mapleberry Blog

I just spoke to a staffer in Rep. Donald Payne's (D - NJ 10) office to see where he stood on the public option via the reconciliation process. She told me that Pelosi is sending them a bill that does NOT include the public option, AT ALL. 

I told the staffer that this was unacceptable - that my preference, despite some good things in the bill, is that he should vote against it. She was apologetic - Payne has been and still is a big supporter of Universal Healthcare. 

Benito Mussolini promised to make the trains run on time, and he probably did. There are good things in the healthcare bill we're being promised, too - but today, as it was in 1930's Italy, the cost is too high. I do not want to be forced by law to buy health insurance from a private company. That, although it pains me to sound like a tea-partier, is the fascist path - the merging of government interests with those of corporations. Government as a marketing arm of the insurance industry. I wouldn't mind paying taxes, or a premium, to Medicare, but mandating that I MUST pay Aetna, UHC, Wellpoint, or one of the other corporate insurers just isn't cool, isn't right, and is profoundly anti-democratic.

I may still support individual candidates from time to time, but I am tired of being fucked by the Democratic Party. I'm done with them. Unfortunately, they're probably not done with me.

I had been ruminating on my last post, about the disconnect between message (We have tax no money for the things you want, and your taxes are too high already) and reality (we're really not taxing you that  much, after all) and how that ties in with the long-term Republican strategy of "starving the beast." (For those who don't remember, "starving the beast" was Republican anti-tax strategist Grover Norquist's term for reducing taxes, and hence the size of government, until it could be "drowned in a bathtub.")

That tax cutting has been the politician's predominant vote-buying ploy of choice over the last 35 years (leading up to California's tax-decimating Proposition 13 in 1978, and its aftermath) is undeniable, dropping average federal tax rates by about 20% since 1980. But - the "beast" held on, at least in New Jersey. At the local level, taxing authorities (municipal governments and school boards, mostly) have been filling the holes left by their federal and state counterparts by furiously raising property taxes - but they've been unable to keep up (overall tax burdens down by about 3% in the last dozen years), especially since legislators in Trenton placed economic-reality-ignoring annual caps on tax rates and/or tax levies.

 After Republican (and über tax-cutter) Governor Christie Whitman left office in 2001, a succession of Democratic governors managed as best they could to hold the line and preserve as much in the way of government programs and services as possible, but it's been a slow downhill grind. Now that Republican Chris Christie has taken office, he's aggressively taken on "the beast" again, cutting New Jersey's funding for municipalities, public schools, and public transportation by double-digit percentages. "The beast" has managed to survive, if not thrive, up to now but, with Mr Christie's ascension as Lord High Executioner (and he has, to be sure, "a little list"), the ol' boy is looking pretty gaunt. The 35 year mission of the Republican Party - to reduce government to a shell incapable of providing any "service" that does not require either incorporation papers or firearms (or, preferably, both) to carry out - is nearly complete.

I'm back to this subject, in part, because Paul Krugman's column in today's New York Times is about this very subject - not about New Jersey or the size of our tax burden but about Republicans' efforts to kill off government and how, despite their rhetoric (and their very real tax cuts) they're unwilling to propose any real cuts in services for fear of angering voters. This appears to be true at the federal level, and even in the legislative branch of New Jersey government (the state Senate and Assembly). However, I have to credit Governor Christie, however odious, for following through. Where his predecessors at Drumthwacket -  McGreevey, Codey, and Corzine - held on as best they could to the programs people most want, Christie is busy dismantling any vestige of citizen-centered, citizen-responsive government and replacing it with government that will not do anything (and soon will not be able to do anything) for citizens.  In Chris Christie Republican-world, government is a cost-center business, providing services only to other businesses, and it has no citizens, only customers (and then only if they can afford to pay).

Are we really paying more taxes than we used to?
In my home state of New Jersey it has become conventional wisdom that we are grossly overtaxed - that tax cuts are the only cure for the slew of evils besetting us. After having watched my own property tax bills more than double since I moved to the state in 1997, it was a sentiment I found hard to gainsay. I did wonder though, if my taxes were so high, why there seemed to be no money available to pay for anything. Our schools and municipalities, after all, have been retrenching and cutting back on programs almost continuously for my entire 13 year tenure in the state, despite the vertiginous (some might say outrageous, or even confiscatory) local tax increases. I did some poking around on the intertubes and, much to my surprise, found that far from being more heavily taxed than in the past, overall tax burdens have gone down almost continuously since the mid 1960's.

The Tax Foundation, which describes itself like this

The mission of the Tax Foundation is to educate taxpayers about sound tax policy and the size of the tax burden borne by Americans at all levels of government. From its founding in 1937, the Tax Foundation has been grounded in the belief that the dissemination of basic information about government finance is the foundation of sound policy in a free society.

has a vast amount of historical tax data available on its website. In going through the data, I found that New Jersey residents' per capita tax burden (Federal, state, and local taxes taken as a whole) had actually declined by 3.1% between 1980 and 2007. The Tax Foundation's handy rubric "Tax Freedom Day" (the notional date we finish paying our taxes and start keeping our income for ourselves) was May 1 in 1980. In 2009 it was two days earlier. In 1998, my first full year in New Jersey, Tax Freedom Day was May 14. In other words, overall tax bills have gone down quite significantly since 1997 and even since 1980. The last time Tax Freedom Day in New Jersey was as early as it was last year, on April 29, was during the Carter administration.

So why do we feel overtaxed now, if we didn't then?
It's all about where we pay those taxes. In 1980, the mean Federal tax rate was 15.31% while New Jersey's state/local tax bite was 10.1%. By 2007, the state/local tax rate had climbed to 11.9% - but during the same period the federal rate had fallen to 12.68%. Using (for simplicity's sake) the 2007 NJ median per capita income of $54,264 (per the Tax Foundation's tables), 1980 federal taxes would have been $8308 while state/local taxes would have been $5481. In 2007, federal taxes would have fallen by $1427 to $6881 while state and local taxes would have risen by $994 to $6475. The total tax bill then, for a median taxpayer in New Jersey, would have fallen from $13,789 to $13,356. Because there has been no change in the NJ marginal income tax rate for taxpayers earning less than $400,000 (at least since 2000, the earliest year I could find data for), the increase in NJ taxes is attributable almost entirely to property tax and therein lies the cause of taxpayer discontent. We feel more burdened NOT because we are paying more taxes, but because federal and state elected officials have been buying our votes for the last 30 years with tax decreases that local elected officials are stuck having to paper over with corresponding tax increases. We feel the bill now, as we did not in 1980, because instead of paying it with money we never had in hand (i.e. via payroll withholding), we now write the checks out every month as part of our mortgage or rent payments.

The problem for New Jersey gets worse. In the period between 1981 and 2005 (again, the only period for which I could find data), for each dollar we sent out of the state as federal taxes the amount coming back to New Jersey declined - from an awful 72 cents on the dollar to an abysmal, disastrous 61 cents. In 1981, using the hypothetical income numbers from the paragraph above, NJ would have gotten back $5982 per capita from the Feds. In 2005 we would have gotten only $4197 - and that $1800 shortfall had to be made up from state and local sources.

The history of continued taxing and spending shows fairly convincingly that New Jersey residents, despite saying they want lower taxes (as who doesn't), even more strongly want the things that their taxes buy and, at least up to now, have been willing to pay to get them. A litany of elected officials in Trenton, though, have been either too clueless to understand this or too cowardly to work it politically. Instead of making the case for finding better ways to pay for the things their constituents want and need, they put arbitrary caps on property tax levies. They base their caps on the CPI despite the undeniable fact that what government spends most of its money on does not track the CPI at all. The cost of employee health insurance, for example, has gone up by double-digit rates each year for the last decade while municipalities and school districts were stuck with 2.5-4% caps on the amount of money they could raise. The disconnect between state-mandated tax caps and market-mandated cost increases has squeezed local taxing authorities to the breaking point - program cuts, furloughs, police, fire and emergency services layoffs have become not only thinkable, but expected annual events. Like their equally cowardly brethren in Washington, Trenton has bought votes by pretending to be tough on budget issues while really just pushing the bills down to the local level. Mayors, Township Committees, Borough Councils, and School Boards have to deal with political fallout both from tax increases and program cuts and layoffs while Trentonians have positioned themselves to look like heroes ( in areas selected for maximum political benefit) by tossing fifty thousand here, a few hundred thousand there, to fill in the local budget gaps they created in the first place.

What to do, what to DO?
New Jersey has only a couple of options, and what Governor Chris Christie is doing now (making draconian cutbacks in state aid to municipalities and school districts) shouldn't even be on the table. As outlined above, our tax burden is no heavier, and in fact is somewhat lighter, than it's been in the past. Cutting services is the answer only to a question no one should be asking.

We need, first of all, to raise taxes, not decrease them. This should be done at the state level, offsetting some significant portion of the (moderately regressive) property tax and the (deeply regressive) sales tax with increases in the (progressive) state income tax. Income tax marginal rates should go up a bit, too - particularly in the over $250,000 income range. (There's no such tax bracket today - a huge gap between the $75,000 and $400,000 brackets that should be filled). This, of course, would take courage from Trenton, courage that appears to be lacking in either party.

We need to hold our Congressional delegation's feet to the fire: New Jersey has senior, quite influential members in both houses of Congress, some in the Democratic leadership (Senator Menendez and Representatives Payne, Pascrell, Andrews, and Pallone come to mind), who just aren't doing enough to bring our tax dollars back to New Jersey. We need to make sure that the Bush tax cuts, due to expire soon, are allowed to do just that - and to call bullshit on any candidate, incumbent or newcomer, who calls that expiration a tax increase.

Finally, we New Jersey taxpayers need to step back and look at the whole tax picture instead of focusing solely on the rise in property taxes, because we're really not doing so badly on that front after all.

As expected, the bought-off Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee (Senators Baucus, Nelson, Conrad, Lincoln, and Carper) killed the public-plan option in their version of healthcare reform - leaving it as a big, fat, sloppy-wet kiss for the insurance companies to whom they really owe their jobs.

I'm not going to bother sending these bozos any emails - there's no point since they've already demonstrated that they are not responsible to their constituents or to the country as a whole, but only to their corporate masters. What I WILL do is give money to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee for ads targeting Baucus and Company. Money and embarrassing publicity are the two things they will respond to.

There are a few things that Dems, as a group, could do:

1. Menendez (as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee) should withhold any campaign money from them .
2. The DSCC should back primary challenges against those 5. The Publicans do this all the time to keep the troops in line and on message.
3. President Obama should call 'em in to the Oval Office and tell 'em, point blank, "When any federal departments (DOE, DOD, HHS, Agriculture, etc) have discretion as to where money will be spent, it will not be spent in your states."
4. The other Dems on Finance should vote to kill the bill before it ever gets out of committee.
5. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should chuck Baucus's bill and bring the much better HELP Committee (Kennedy/Harkin/Dodd/Sanders) bill to the floor instead.

I doubt any of these will happen, since the swearing-in process for Democrats entering Congress or the White House seems to require orchiectomy surgery.

There was enough in President Obama's speech last night, but only barely. There was a bit of red meat and some tugged heartstrings, but I'll say this - his health plan is far too considerate of Big Insurance & Big Pharma and not nearly considerate enough of what is needed to truly reform the system.

In the President's proposal it would be illegal for people not to buy insurance from a private insurance company. In effect, he's adding a new tax, to be paid not to the government but to private, for-profit companies. Equating this mandate to the requirement to carry automobile insurance, as Obama did last night, is bogus because you can choose not to own a car but you can't simply choose not to get sick. This makes Aetna, Wellpoint, United Healthcare et al. into latter-day publicans, who've purchased the right to squeeze the populace for as much as they can. What the President laid out last night is a giveaway to insurance companies - the profits from the 30-50 million new, mandated "customers" will far outstrip any reduction in their profits due to restrictions on policy rescission and rejections for pre-existing conditions.

As the President described it, the public plan option will be there only for people who are otherwise unable to get insurance - i.e. only for those without an employer plan available to them. But what if the health insurance an employer provides sucks ass? Apparently it's "too bad, Charlie" because you can't opt out of employer insurance in favor of the public plan. It was not clear, but it appears that employers will be unable to choose the public plan when shopping for group health insurance for their employees - it will be for uninsured individuals only. This undercuts the raison d'etre of a public insurance option - to provide real, lower overhead/lower cost plans that will force insurers to keep internal costs down and innovate on the services they offer.

The health insurance "Exchanges" won't go into effect until 2013 (Why not? The Feds set up the Department of Homeland Security in mere months, and it has well over 100,000 employees) - leaving the uninsured still uninsured (except by a so-far-hypothetical assigned-risk pool that is likely to be very expensive to buy in to) for the next 4 years. In the meantime, insurers will almost certainly be raising premiums to cover the reduction in revenue from having to cover pre-existing conditions and rescinding the policies of sick people.

The President did not mention one of the most serious problems facing healthcare consumers today - the cost of prescription drugs. There's still no provision for negotiating lower prices. No re-visiting Medicare Part D to allow price negotiations. No elimination of the Part D "donut hole." And nothing that addresses the price disparity between what Americans pay for drugs and what the rest of the world pays (Canadian prescription drugs cost 35-90% less than they do here in the U.S.).

What also went completely unmentioned and unaddressed by the President was the massive waste of money on paper-pushing. Hospitals and physicians alike spend hundreds of billions each year on filing claims, requesting pre-certifications, issuing referrals - none of which add a single iota of value to the system. Health exchanges will only make that aspect worse.

The only viable solution for most of what really ails American healthcare is a single-payer plan. Despite his public support for it in the past, the President went out of his way last night to sneer at single-payer and its supporters, in what has lately become the Democratic Party modus vivendi - i.e. throw your most avid supporters under the bus while bending over backwards to try to satisfy your opposition, who will never support you anyway.

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I saw a news story today reporting that Henry Waxman (D-CA) had edged out John Dingell Jr. (D-MI), in a rather hard-fought campaign, to be the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee for the 111th Congress. An interesting story in its way - it appealed to my wonky nature, especially since it made me worry that Rep. Waxman might relinquish the Chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform - a job he has performed with zeal and distinction, holding the Administration's feet to the fire whenever circumstances demanded - i.e. pretty much all the time.

But it really set me off when the article reported that Rep. Dingell has served in the house since 1955. "That has to be a typo," I thought, "Maybe they meant 1975." But no, John Dingell has been in the House of Representatives since December 13, 1955 - 2 1/2 weeks before my first birthday and well over half a century ago!

Odder still, the previous occupant of the that Congressional seat had been John Dingell Sr, who held it from 1933 until his death in 1955, when Junior took over. So - the residents of Michigan's 15th/16th (they merged in 2002) Congressional district have been represented by a John Dingell since the dawn of the FDR/New deal era, over 75 years ago.

I am not a fan of legislated term limits, and I have no axe to grind with Rep. Dingell - but there's something about this that strikes me, in a very visceral way, as somehow vaguely un-American, and just plain wrong.

(I do have to note that Henry Waxman has himself been in Congress since 1975, when I was but a sophomore in college - even so, John Dingell Sr/Jr still have 42 years on him.)

Hillary at State? So all the news sources seem to be saying. The latest I've seen is that she has been offered the position and has asked for a little time to think it over.

Last night in a conversation I had at the South Orange "Harvest Ball" fundraiser, someone suggested an interesting and provocative scenario: Hillary Clinton resigns her senate seat to become Secretary of State, and then NY Governor David Patterson names Bill Clinton to serve out the remainder of Hillary's term.

Weird, eh? Unprecedented. But not in a bad way. I guess this could depend, at least in part, on how much the President-elect trusts the Clintons now that the election is past.

Connecticut giveth in return...


New York Times

Same-sex marriage comes to Connecticut!

So when does this happen in my home state of New Jersey? Come on, Trenton, get off your asses and get this done!

Rachel Maddow is the best thing going on MSNBC - she's funny, goofy, cute, amazingly endearing, and very, very smart. She was, for too long, the best thing on Air America Radio, and certainly the best of their home-grown talent.

But what's up with her frequent MSNBC guest Ana Marie Cox? More specifically, why is she a guest at all? Cox was often entertaining at Wonkette as a kind of Gen-X Maureen Dowd - her shtick is a Dowd-like funny (and often mean-spirited) snarkiness, but she seems utterly devoid of Dowd's (too-rarely displayed) gift for the trenchant observation. Cox has not been an especially good reporter, and as an analyst she's neither very deep nor very insightful.

So Rachel, please - find someone else for whatever role it is you think Ana Marie Cox is filling.

In this period of election postmortems, there's a lot (too much!) chatter about what happened to the "old" John McCain - the one everyone respected. To this I can only say "Get a clue, people!" That John McCain never existed - he was a creation of savvy marketing and a sympathetic press-corps.

Senator McCain was always the same creepy guy we saw this time around - the difference between then and now is that this year, he was THE candidate instead of 2000's the OTHER candidate, so the press was forced to look at him with a more critical eye. When they did (as in Tim Dickinson's damning Rolling Stone article), he responded both by withdrawing from them and by becoming bellicose. Without the day-to-day mutual wanking McCain and the press had enjoyed, reporters started to be able to see the character flaws and mean-spiritedness that had always been there.

The line of people waiting to vote, as it snaked around the Town Hall meeting chamber. At this point the wait was about an hour and fifteen minutes. Several times during the day the wait was well over 1 1/2 hours, and it was no less than 30 minutes from 6:00 AM, when polls opened, until 6:00 PM. The voters in my district, District 3, were luckier than those in District 6. Their line snaked through the hallways and out into the parking lot.

Remarkably, very few people left - no more than a dozen. But we sure could have used another couple of voting machines.

Californians ought to be ashamed.

Members of the LDS church deserve to be ashamed.


The only upside to Prop 8's passage - the demographic groups that got it passed were the 45-54s (by a small margin), 55-64 and, most heavily, the over 65's. Time will have its way, and those who voted for it will sooner or later not be with us any longer. Give it 5 or 8 or 10 years and there will be few left who think it's okay to declare their fellows less than human.

I feel like my country is my own again - for the moment, at least.

Despicably anti-American crap.

"I'm the NRA - and I don't believe in Democracy."

Gun firm head resigns over Obama support

Published: Oct. 31, 2008 at 7:35 PM

STEVENSVILLE, Mont., Oct. 31 (UPI) -- The namesake of Montana-based Cooper Firearms has been asked to resign as president of the company after he expressed support for Barack Obama.

The company said it asked Dan Cooper, founder and part owner of Cooper Firearms, to resign as president after he voiced support for the Democratic Illinois senator's bid for president in a USA Today interview published Tuesday, USA Today reported Friday.

"Although we all believe everyone has a right to vote and donate as they see fit, it has become apparent that the fallout may affect more than just Mr. Cooper," the company said in a statement on its Web site Wednesday. "It may also affect the employees and the shareholders of Cooper Firearms. The board of directors has asked Mr. Cooper to resign as president."

Cooper, who said he usually votes Republican, told the paper in the interview he planned to vote for Obama "probably because of the war. And also because the Republican Party has moved so far right in recent years."

Cooper said Thursday he had submitted his resignation to the board.

"There is nothing on this earth I will not do for my employees ... When the Internet anger turned on these innocent people, I felt it was important to distance myself from the company so as not to cause any further harm," he said.

It's long past time to end stuff like this.

I was going to write a rationale for my Obama support, considering that, earlier this year, I had written some not-so-complimentary things about him. He was not my first, nor even my second, choice out of the huge Democratic field that had entered the primary fray. But that doesn't matter anymore. He is, I have come to believe, truly the "Change We Need."

There are many good things I could write about Senator Obama, but I don't need to - my friend Mark at A Cautious Man has done it for me - eloquently, as always.

Don't forget to vote tomorrow - it's probably the most important vote you will ever cast.

It could happen



Don't let it.


video via Avedon at Eschaton
link via tristero at Hullabaloo