Baptists and Bootleggers, Deluxe Edition(s)

This week, the Senate is holding hearing on the activities of two lobbyists, Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon. It seems that they paid Ralph Reed, one-time leader of the Christian Coalition, to lead attacks against the Tigua Indian Tribe's Speaking Rock Casino. Once that campaign was successful, they then offered their contact with Tom Delay to get the decision reversed in exchange for campaign contributions. Got that? First they paid to have the Casino outlawed, then they got paid to get it reinstated.

The campaign to outlaw the casino could not have been won on the platform of "Make it illegal so we can peddle influence." No, they needed moral cover. Anybody know where to find a Baptist for hire? I guess they found Ralph Reed.

Could you ask for a clearer case of Baptist and Bootlegger association? As it turns out, yes you can.

Demographics

A few years ago - about 4, IIRC - a friend, looking at the new USA Today map, asked me how it could be that the election was so close, but that most of the country appeared to be for Bush. Because I had looked up some figures even earlier than that, the answer was obvious to me: density. I knew, for example, that approximately 1/4 of the population lives in the 13 or so largest cities, and 1/2 live in about the top 25-30 urban centers. It's for this reason that the abolition of the electoral college would mean that presidential candidates would never leave the coasts except to visit Chicago, Phoenix, and Dallas. I'm sure I'm not the only one who saw it, but there are those who dispute it.

At that time, Paul Krugman reportedly wrote a piece claiming that the Blue states support the Red States (sorry, no link, probably in the NYT). At the time, I assumed it was true and took no further interest in it because it fit neatly with something I have been pointing out to racists for years: most welfare recipients are white. They always counter with the claim that black welfare recipients are more common than black citizens are in the US as a percentage. Perhaps, but the bill that the federal government sends me is based on the total number of welfare recipients, not the portion that is black or white. Total Number. Caucasions contribute far more to that number than other races. The problem with welfare isn't the color of the people receiving it, it's that there is a need - real or perceived - in the first place.

Okay, well, the "Blue State Subsidy" claim has arisen again, and this time I decided to check it out (original source here). Again, I don't dispute it, but there's something in those patterns that has me curious. Now, I couldn't use their sources (the Tax Foundation's "State-by-state tax burden model"), but I could use the Statistical Abstract for state-by-state spending and the IRS for state-by-state tax stats for 2003. My results were similar, though the actual numerical results of money received to taxes paid ratios were different.



I found two interesting results: one, that taxes paid and benefits received track right along with population (see figure), and two, the total amount of benefits spent in the "net donor" Blue states listed in the links above (New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, Massachusetts, California, and New York) are far more than than what is spent in the "net recipient" Red states (North Dakota, Mississippi, Alaska, West Virginia, Montana, Alabama, South Dakota, and Arkansas, and I would add New Mexico since it went Red this time around).

The five most populous Blue states (CA, NY, IL, PA, MI) paid 33.5% of the total taxes paid, and only received 29% of the benefits doled out from Washington. The five largest Red States (TX, FL, OH, GA, NC) paid out 22% of the total taxes paid and received only 21% of the benefits. Yes, they paid more than they received. If you expand to the Top 10 largest (includes NJ, MA, WA, MD, WI), the corresponding numbers are 45% paid and 39% received for the Blue States and 31% paid and 32.8% received for the Red States (include VI, IN, TN, MO, AZ). They are starting to receive more than they paid in. But add it up: the 20 most populous states are paying 76% of the taxes and receiving about 72% of the benefits. That leaves only about 1/4 of the federal budget to be divided among the other 30 states, most of which are Red. There were only 20 states and Washington DC that went Blue, leaving 30 states that went Red. All of the Blue states and Washington paid 56% of the tax burden and receive 48% of the largesse. All of the Red states paid 44% of the tax burden and receive 52% of the largesse. Amazingly close to the vote totals, no? While I think it's a coincidence that probably surfaces in any figures that are close to being evenly split, it is well known that incumbent parties have been using discretionary spending to buy votes.

Let me put that another way: between California and New York, they receive $335 B that gets distributed among 54 million people. You have to add up Wyoming, both Dakotas, Alsaka, Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, W. Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kentucky, S. Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama before you get to $324 B (adding Colorado bumps it over $350 B), and you have to add the populations of those states to get 51 M (plus Arizona to get to 56.5).

Two more points: What about looking at this in terms of paying/spending per capita? And what is the correspondence of high income earners and population density?

To answer the first question, I took my results and divided by the population of each state (and DC). For the Top 5, Red Staters paid out $6342 per person and received $5894 per person. Blue Staters paid out $7280 per person but received only $6143 per person. They paid more per person, but also received more. As you go to less populated states, Blue staters pay more, but continue receiving roughly the same per person, while Red staters gradually pay less per person and receive more. When you include every state one but DC, Red states are receiving about $6540/person, slightly more than $6522 per person received in Blue states.

The Red states pay more per person than the Blue states ($5740 vs. $7710). My conjecture is that this has to do with the relative costs of living in those places (you gotta have a much higher paying job to afford to live in NYC than you do to live upstate, where the counties went red, and people who are paid more pay more in taxes) and with the distribution of really wealthy people. It is well known that - even after the "tax cuts for the wealthy - the richest 1% pay about 33% of the total tax bill, and the wealthiest 10% pay about 67% of the total tax bill. In other words, I am suggesting that the real reason for the Blue/Red subsidization is that the real party of the wealthy is the Democratic Party. Research in The Economist apparently supports this hypothesis: they found that people worth between $1 M and $10 M went for Bush 63-37, but people worth more than $10 M went for Kerry 59-41. Hmmm ... party of Working Class, indeed.

Bottom Line: You Blue Staters are overstating the amount of subsidization you are forced to do. Most of that money is coming right back to you, and the rest is divided among dozens of states mostly by population, so dividing federal spending by statewide taxation overstates the amount of money going to, say, Alaska or New Mexico. Besides, you keep voting for politicians who run on a redistribution platform, so these are the chickens coming home to roost. And for you Red Staters: you are being subsidized, whether you like it or not. Studies show that people believe that all Congressman but their own belly up to the pork barrel. Well, guess what? Yours does it, too, and you need to be aware of it the next time you have a chance to vote.

Satire, ignorance, or intentionally misleading?

This piece of refuse in the New York Times has to be the worst column I've read in years. Gee, incumbents win - what to do? The three ideas Mr. Kristoff comes up with are either inane or irrelevant.

1. Non-partisan "experts" redistrict the states
2. Eliminate the electoral college and use the popular vote for the president
3. Funnel campaign donations through a blind trust

Really? That's it?!

1. Who gets to pick the "non-partisan" experts? Maybe the state legislatures? Duh, not gonna work.
2. If you eliminate the electoral college, who would have won most (though not all) of the presidential elections? The person who won anyhow, usually the incumbent. So how does this even address the original question? Let me guess: Mr. Kristoff lives in a blue county.
3. Yeah, big campaign contributors are never going to tell the recipient that he just put a gob of cash into the blind trust, nor is he going to tell him about the PAC or 527 contribution he just made.

Here's a real suggestion for eliminating incumbent victory: term limits. No more than 2 terms in any single legislative or executive area (House, Senate, President). I vote against incumbents on principle: Pete Domenici has evolved from a budget hawk to a pork monger in the past 20 years, but Republicans vote for him no matter how much he acts like Robert Byrd.

Troop charity

Have people always supported their troops materially in one way or another (in addition to their tax burden)? I don't know, but I do know that it was commonplace during WWII. That makes these kind of snarky comments unnecessary in addition to being untrue:

The number ONE request at Walter Reed hospital is phone cards. Because the priority of our government is to continue tax cuts for the likes of Paris Hilton, the government doesn’t pay LD phone charges and these guys, many of them amputees, are rationing their calls home.

Many will be there throughout the holidays.

Remember that most are from poor families. It is disgusting that they cannot keep in touch with family after what they have been asked to sacrifice for BushCo; especially this time of year.

Support the troops—cuz BushCo doesn’t. Send phone cards of any amount to:

Medical Family Assistance Center
Walter Reed Medical Center
6900 Georgia Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20307-5001

They say they need an “endless” supply of these—any amount even $5 is greatly appreciated.

Why untrue?

1. "Our" government doesn't have a single priority. All needs are equally important, which is how you end up with $400 B deficits.
2. Tax cuts are the number one priority of people who want the government to be smaller. The Bush Administration and the Republican Congress have not enacted tax cuts in any meaningful way. They constitute less than 1% of "our government".
3. Paris Hilton is just one of millions of people who "benefitted" from cuts in her marginal tax rate. More than likely, the people who wrote this crap benefitted, also. I doubt that they sent extra money in to the DoD.
4. The government doesn't not pay for LD calls because of tax cuts - spending of all varieties is up, not down. Services are not being cut to "pay for" tax cuts: the services are being increased and thereby negating the tax cuts. Sheesh!
   
5. Most of these guys are not from poor families; frontline soldiers are more likely to be from working class families.
6. BushCo doesn't support the troops? And by implication, these people do? Let's see what happens the next time the Administration requests more money for things like, um, supplies.

I doubt they had this much compassion for the various victims of Clinton-era bombing campaigns.

On the other hand, this website demonstrates a great deal more genuine concern for soldiers. I encourage people to consider donating to both, regardless of the politics behind them. Remember that soldiers are among the few true public servants - they volunteer for a job which would pay a great deal more if it weren't the US Army or Marines. Agree with them or not, they demonstrate true professionalism - military bearing they call it - in the face of some pretty scary shit.

Question - does supporting soldiers make it easier or harder for the executive branch to conduct wars? Should you do it anyway?

Open Source

There's a lot of excitement about Firefox, out there. Over at Catallarchy, Randall's comment that this is the open-source movement's first mainstream success draws criticism.

First, I think Open Source is anti-corporate, not necessarily anti-capitalist. That's essentially A-C.

My criteria for whether or not something is going to catch on and be mainstream: can my Mom install it? Mom can't install Gnu/Linux, and she is not going to view the opportunity to write her own drivers and recompile the kernel as an advantage. I don't think that the fact that many (surprisingly many, but nowhere near most) servers use open-source software is altogether impressive. System Administrators are more likely to enjoy the access/recompile features, and I think they are generally more tolerant of issues with software that is written by anyone other than MS than they are with MS issues (hint: if there were no adverse issues with Linux, there would be no FAQs or newsgroups filled with people asking questions). I'm going to leave my copy of Redhat installed right where it belongs for now: on the shelf.

Most of us aren't going to install Firefox without first owning IE (not me - I use Netscape). I'll get a little more excited by the prospect of open-source when they can build their own processors and memory without corporations.

Arafat

Two jokes struck me upon hearing that he had gone to Paris:

(1) What, couldn't he have found a nice Jewish doctor and settled down in Gaza?

(2) Reports said that he had "checked in to a hospital in Paris, and his condition is deteriorating." Isn't that redundant?

Election results

I swore off any TV or radio coverage of the election. In fact, I tried to avoid any coverage, but I succumbed.

Early in the day, I checked Drudge and Tradesports and was surprised to find Kerry ahead on the electoral map, and way ahead on Tradesports. Bush had previously been up to .51, but when I checked it, Kerry was up to .6.

That evening, after working online, I decided to check Drudge before going to bed. There were links to Florida and Ohio. Tradesportrs had flipped back to .6 for Bush. Very wierd.

I heard one rumor that the news services had leaked the locations of exit polling locations to Democrats, and that they had sent activists there to skew the early results. If true, does this tactic actually work? If so, it tells me everything I need to know about people who vote for the 2 major parties.

But for that to really be effective, you have to believe that tens of news people told tens or hundreds of Democrat party activists, and that they in turn told hundreds or thousands of activists where to go. I think it is not likely that a conspiracy of that size could remain secret.

On the other hand, you now have rumors (here, here, here, and so on) of vote fraud. "Evidence" includes the fact that exit polls didn't square with final results. I don't see that as being a big deal, since early exit polls are likely to be skewed by people who vote early, i.e. hard core activists and Bush haters to whom voting is more important than work. After researching, I found that Bush's final numbers actually came up even in those areas where he lost: are we really expected to believe that Republicans were able to hack the voting machines in every county, even where they were going to lose? To believe that, you have to believe that hundreds of hackers and party activists managed to circumvent or corrupt thousands or tens of thousands of both friendly and hostile county clerk staffs. A conspiracy like that is incredibly likely to be exposed within hours of the event, perhaps even beforehand. Look how quickly we got reports of votes for Kerry on machines in Philadelphia.

Another "Ah-HA!" is the scandal wherein contractors for the Republicans were throwing away Democratic registrations. Apparently, that went back and forth for a while when it was countered with allegations that the contractors were "really" working for Democratic organizations and planting the throwaways. It finally turned out they really were working for Republicans. In the final analysis, it is a moot point because the new voting laws require provisional balloting. And it overlooks the documented cases where Democrats (and probably Republicans) were guilty of paying people to register, and registering people several times.

Conspiracy theorists point toward supposed campaigns by Republicans to call people and tell them to vote on Wednesday. Not only are these rumors hard to tie down, but they work in both directions. I read about people claiming to be from Emily's List calling people with incorrect polling locations. In any case, I got hit up by so many canvassers this year that would overwhelm anyone who dared spread disinformation.

If there was one likely source of voter fraud this year, it was the new early voting allowed throughout the country. "Vote early, vote often" as the Daley campaign was supposed to have said. However, I don't think that kind of retail fraud is as efective as the wholesale fraud that hacking voting machines would have been. That requires witnesses and trails of evidence: where are they?

Update: A roundup of debunked theories.