Archives for Sunday, 3/13/05

I reproduce for your reading pleasure the lyrics of a little song my 7-year-old daughter and her 6-year-old cousin wrote tonight, spelling mistakes intact. I’ll buy a beer for the first person who correctly deciphers the content.

Prosint Bose is stopied and men.
Prosint Bose looks like a piall of po.
Prosint Bose is men,
and we are geting out of here.

And yes, there is a point to posting this online, which I will get to later.

UPDATE:
Mark gets the beer, but Scott deserves credit for decoding most of it. The correct translation is:

President Bush is stupid and mean,
President Bush looks like a pile of pooh,
President Bush is mean,
And we are getting out of here.

I should mention that when I asked my daughter to translate the spellings, she could hardly stop laughing as she sang me the song. Children have a natural predilection for scatological humor, and often take great joy in mocking adults… so what could be funnier than comparing the president of the United States to a pile of pooh?

Like any doting parent I spent some time pondering the lyrics as we drove home from her cousin’s house, and a couple observations came to mind that prompted me to blog on her little exercise in political satire.

First, it struck me that her commentary was not really all that more childish than the level of discourse that sometimes runs through the threads on this blog. One might argue that “a pile of pooh” is as apt a political metaphor as any, for describing the Bush administration; indeed, I could probably write a couple thousand words expanding on the analogy. But on its own, it’s just the kind of empty (if sometimes funny) personal attack that too often substitutes for real policy debate. President Bush may very well be stupid and mean, but until my daughter backs it up with evidence and analysis, she’s not going to persuade many of her peers.

However, my second observation runs a bit deeper, and it is one which I am happy to see has already been touched upon in this thread. My daughter comes from a very politically passionate family — you might be surprised to learn, even more so on her mother’s side than her father’s. Even without direct instruction, she is being raised through osmosis, to be a liberal Democrat, in the same way that a child might be raised a Catholic or a Jew… in the same way that her Seattle-born, Irish Catholic mother and her Philadelphia-born Jewish father were both raised with a shared political philosophy.

Just like the friends of mine who describe themselves as “recovering Catholics,” there are certainly many children who grow up to reject the political tendencies of their parents, through some combination of thoughtful conversion and sheer rebelliousness. But politics and party identification tends to run through families… and it runs deep.

No doubt there are many voters who are politically secular, with no loyalty to one party or another, but it is safe to bet that few if any of you who regularly join me in this blog fall into that category. We are the political hardcore; for most of us, our political ideology is deeply rooted in our childhood, even for those who rejected the politics of their parents. Thus, our politics are integral to our personal identity.

I myself am a liberal, and while I may be persuaded to adopt a traditionally conservative position on particular points of policy, I am no more likely to accept Karl Rove as my savior, as I am Jesus Christ.

But as a liberal, I am also proudly a moral relativist. I do not believe that those of you with whom I disagree with politically, are evil. Wrong, but not evil. (Well… maybe Cynical.)

For the umpteenth time I want to repeat that I don’t mind the name-calling and invective, indeed, I encourage it if it makes an otherwise wonkish policy debate a little more entertaining. But I also encourage a little more self-awareness… an understanding that your core political beliefs are not nearly as much a product of reasoned introspection as you would like to imagine, and that the political “other” is not really so different from yourself. It is rhetorically convenient to demonize the opposition as a bunch of liars and thieves, willing to do anything to seize power, but if you truly believe this, then I suggest you need to look deep into your own heart — and your childhood — to confront your own inner demons.

So here’s hoping we can all continue to walk together through the dog park of Washington politics, avoid stepping in the occasional “piall of po,” and sometimes even learn something from one another.

Andrew Garber has done an excellent job in today’s Seattle Times, of explaining in layman’s terms why it is the state government faces cutting services, even as existing taxes are producing an estimated $1 billion in additional revenues over next two year budget: “State budget writers tangle with high cost of just standing still.” I hope the Times doesn’t mind if borrow one of their graphics, to help explain:

What we have is a “structural deficit,” where the costs of maintaining existing services at current levels are rising faster than tax revenues. The economic figure that most close tracks growth in demand for public services, is growth in personal income, yet because our tax structure is so heavily dependent on sales and excise taxes (only New Hampshire is more dependent on a single tax) government revenues simply cannot keep up with demand.

Excise taxes, like those on gasoline, alcohol and tobacco, are taxes on volume, not price, and as such rise slower than consumption over time, as inflation raises the price of the product and eats away at the value of the dollar. For example, while the Legislature added a nickel a gallon to the gas tax last year, the gas tax is now half what it was a couple years ago as a percentage of the retail price. While that is a dramatic example, it illustrates the impact of inflation on excise taxes in general.

The general sales tax, which is by far our largest source of revenue, also becomes less adequate over time, for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that we only tax goods… an ever decreasing portion of our post-industrial service economy. At the same time, inflation, particularly in health care, is hitting the state budget much harder than it is the private sector.

Nowhere is the state’s inflation problem better illustrated than in health care, which has been described as the “Pac-Man eating the state budget.”

For example, a single dose of Avinza, a prescription pain-relief medication, jumped $72 in the past year to $208 a dose. The cost of an electric hospital bed went up $101, to $1,407. And the cost of a wheelchair increased by $98, to $2,366.

Add cost and caseload increases to expected cuts in federal Medicaid spending, and the state suddenly finds it needs about $695 million in additional funds over the next two years to maintain existing health-care services for the poor.

Some would argue the solution is to simply cut health-care services for the poor. But even if one were to follow such a Hobbesian policy, it would end up costing our economy more, not less. Poor people will continue to get sick, showing up at emergency rooms at more advance stages of illness, when treatment is more expensive, and shifting the costs to the rest of us. Whatever savings we might see in lower taxes will more than be eaten up in higher insurance premiums.

And the inflationary pressures aren’t just limited to health-care:

To maintain existing levels of service, the state needs to come up with an additional $90 million to pay for prisons over the next two years, $164 million to run colleges and universities, $383 million for public-employee pensions and $444 million for public schools. That doesn’t include pay raises or benefits increases.

Of course, Republicans argue that the solution is simply to reign-in spending, but their usual metaphors fall flat. Running a government is not like running a business, or balancing your household budget. Increasing class size does not make teachers more productive, and we just can’t cut federally mandated “No Child Left Behind” requirements, like a family might cancel cable TV.

Indeed, the whole anti-tax movement that is partially responsible for our perpetual budget crises, has government finances exactly ass-backwards.

After all, people want the services, said Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane. Perhaps the true question is, “how much [money] do we need, to do what we want to do?”

Exactly!

We levy taxes to provide the services voters want; we don’t provide services simply to spend the tax dollars we have. What’s missing from the debate is the real debate… the debate over the proper size and scope of government. Republicans don’t want to have this debate because they know they’ll lose, and because they know that without the debate, we’ll just continue continue hobbling along with the status quo, gradually defunding and eliminating government programs, until their dream of a libertarian dystopia is achieved by default.

In the end, Washington state will be faced with the choice between implementing an income tax… or becoming Mississippi. There are many in the Republican leadership who would greatly prefer the latter.