for 22 February 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.
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Revolting Acts It's good to see that the contraversy over I-695 is still getting attention outside of Washington state. Unfortunately, we're stuck with it, and what the "talented" Eyman has gotten away with is really deplorable. The initiative was largely supported by non-commuting suburbia and counties in Eastern Washingston (sticksville). So the rest of us city-dwellers who voted against this stupid initiative have to endure even longer commutes, cancelled bus routes, and delayed freeway improvements, among other things. Tim Eyman is an idiot, as far as I'm concerned, but a crafty one who knows who'll buy into his political impulses, and how to spin his ideas to those poor suckers. He was also a staunch supporter of I-200, the initiative to halt affirmative action programs in this state, just so you know. Thanks for the article. Suzanne Asprea <sasprea@tfmg.com> You're welcome. Yeah, I-200 was the test run for I-695, wasn't it? Appealing to a very specific, angry voter base with little desire to research the implications of their vote, resulting in economic damage to specific sub-groups and general economic losses limited to the major cities that is difficult to quantify because it involves potential rather than actual business. All to further a vague political issue rather than one of governance or economics. I'd say very crafty. 40th Street Black  Who gives a rat's ass? One scam after another to free the poor ultrarich of the chains of responsibility are pressed and passed with the fervent assistance of those who are most harmed by such "reforms". People in a Democracy truly get the government and policies they deserve. R. Bruce Anderson, Ph.D. Department of PoliticalScience Hastings College <banderson@hastings.edu> Yes, but the people who vote against the reforms get the government and policies the other people deserve. 40th Street Black The Democrats' "simplified progressive tax plans" will prove an oxymoron, as the Barbara Streisand exemption has already shown (i.e., if you're a heavy contributor, guess what you get in return?). I fail to see how keeping money out of the hands of government is generally a bad thing. These are the same self-serving asses whose "War on Drugs" has resulted in a factual war on the civil rights of the poor and not-so-poor alike. If restraining the police state requires a meat axe, so be it. Rob McMillin <rlm@pricegrabber.com> The problem with using a meat axe to restrain the police state is the judgment of this particular butcher. Those programs are the last to go. 40th Street Black Filler Hey Polly: Just wanted to say thanks for the laugh. "You people are fucking with my emotional development in ways you can scarcely imagine." Hah! I've been thinking that about you guys since 1996. JWH <jhardin@mail.sbc-adv.com> Imagine, then, how much we're fucking with our own emotional development just by being here for you all these years. Your charitable friend, Polly Long live Mr. Flinchy! Does he make a comeback this year? John Fracisco <john.fracisco@mindspring.com> Oh, Mr. Flinchy makes a comeback at least three or four times per hour. Studies show that every ten minutes, there's a Mr. Flinchy somewhere ducking out of some responsibility or implied obligation. Maybe a public service announcement is called for... Polly Revolting Acts I would like to kick Tim Eyman in the head. Then I would bitch-slap all the weak minded or greedy suckers that voted for I-695. Only the rich with their obscenely expensive SUVs and large corporation with their massive fleets of automobiles benefited from the biggest scam ever in Washington politics. I don't own a car and I will be paying MORE now. How fucked up is that? I pay more for the ferry and bus when some 30ish bitch gets to drive her Excursion by HERSELF to work everyday for $30 a year. My friend's tabs went up... Now Tim Eyman wants to divert nearly all of the states transportation budget to roads. Forget Salaries, or ferries, or buses, let's just build roads. Hey look at L.A., it worked fine there...Give me a fucking break. guedo espedia <espedia@hotmail.com> The conflict between road services and public transportation has been a fundamental regional political battle for years. I'm with you -- I've never understood why the ability to live an hour or more away from one's workplace was considered a right for which people should tax me. At the same time, I'm more than happy to have these people live far away from me. Maybe it's how you look at it. 40th Street Black Without a doubt the best essay I've seen on Suck to date. I look forward to more. You have set the bar very high. Steven P. Sanabria <diegodeigh@pikeonline.net> Thank you, Steven. I look forward to doing more, even though the thought of any bar makes me flash back to the horrors of the "track and field" unit in sixth grade gym. Dick Fosbury has a lot to answer for. 40th Street Black Back in the days when computers were time-sharing behemoths, the Internet was a DARPA project and the hottest user interface you could get was a DecWriter, Professor Arthur Laffer drew what can best be described as a crude outline of the female breast on a cocktail napkin and called it economics. That level of thought appealed not only to arguably the most idiotic person ever elected President of the United States, but also to droves of clueless dupes who voted for him not just once, but twice and screamed for the opportunity to do so a third time. Never mind that Ronald Reagan's first and only attempt to actually use Dr. Laffer's theory resulted in disaster. Reagan simply spent the rest of his two terms in office prostituting traditional Keynesian principals, borrowing trillions of dollars to pump the economy and calling the results the fruit of supply-side genius. The Laffer curve is pure bunk of course, because it is based on the fallacious assumption that government revenue is a univariate function of tax rate, when in fact government revenue is a highly complex multivariate function of tax rate. Raising or lowering the effective tax rate therefore entails movement along a multi-dimensional surface, and if you don't know the all the partial derivatives that determine the gradient, you don't know what government revenue (or inflation, or employment, or interest rates) will do in response. Martin Gardner dubbed the actual multivariate function the "technosnarl" in an extremely insightful and witty deconstruction of Laffer and his ilk. It was read, unfortunately, only by people who regularly followed Gardner's column in Scientific American, which is to say by damn few people at all. So, strange as it may seem, lowering taxes does not necessarily bring us prosperity and raising them does not necessarily deprive us of it. And the same Americans who bellyache the most about paying taxes are often the first to line up and demand government spending, be it on farm subsidies for the burly husbandman, an AIDS cure for the pierced and tattooed, or new houses for those cretins who insist on building their homes in flood plains. A government that collects no taxes also does absolutely nothing for its citizens. And with the exception of a few lunatics still camped out in their Y2K Armageddon bunkers, the citizens do not, by and large, actually desire a government that expects them to fix their own potholes, organize their own protection from criminals, and keep the chemical plant down the road from dumping poison in their water supply by themselves. If you scratch below the surface on the issue of taxes, you'll find out that what pisses people off about them is not so much the money, it's the way the taxes are collected and how the taxes are spent. But politicians never go past the superficial on taxes because doing so means confronting organized special interests, snugly entrenched government bureaucracy and, worst of all, the twisted, nasty, incompetent and vindictive tax collectors themselves. Few, if any, politicians have that kind of balls. So enter into the resulting moral vacuum the citizen-demagogues, equipped, perhaps, with some doodle-festooned cocktail napkins of their own, each vigorously thumping the tub to pass a proposition restricting this or that tax. Such guileless folk at least have their ignorance as an excuse. What Dr. Laffer's excuse might be, God alone knows. Walter Bauer <BauerW@DynCorp.com> Having spent more than a few cocktail parties drawing breasts on napkins, I can hazard a guess. Maybe this is all Virgil Partch's fault? At any rate, I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis, with the possible exception of your characterization of citizen-demogogues as "guileless." 40th Street Black |
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