Democracy for Utah - Government, Good

What you get with low taxes

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:47:11 -0700

As a Democrat, I'm in favor of setting taxes high enough to pay for the common goods we all want (but no higher). In contrast, Republicans want "low taxes, no matter what." The current financial crisis shows what happens when our government has no tax revenue coming in (Salt Lake Tribune):

Utah County's Interstate 15 traffic jam will get no relief and the Mountain View freeway will stay on the drawing board with dozens of other state highway projects because of plummeting tax receipts, transportation officials announced Thursday.

No road construction that isn't currently under contract will go forward. The state is indefinitely shelving $3.9 billion in projects — led by the $2.6 billion lawmakers previously steered toward I-15 in Utah County — but continuing work on $2 billion in current projects. [...]

News of the I-15 stoppage startled Utah County Commission Chairman Gary Anderson. "Holy cow," he said. "That just doesn't make sense to me."

Utah County badly needs the new lanes, and the state should recognize that it also does on its major north-south trucking route. "Between the Point of the Mountain and Spanish Fork, we're just a parking lot," Anderson said.

If you want government to build roads, it needs tax revenue. It's pretty simple.

Naughty Joe; No Pork

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:51:29 -0700

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/an-open-letter-to-joe-lie_b_145026.html

Check this out.Letter to Joe Lieberman on the Huffington Post.

Fix the financial crisis and help homeowners, too

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:32:13 -0700

There are good ideas out there (NYTimes):

One interesting idea was conceived by two veteran investment managers, Thomas H. Patrick and Mac Taylor. They propose refinancing all $1.1 trillion of the loans in securitization pools that are still performing but that may soon face punishing interest rate resets.[Translation: folks who are paying their current mortgages but will not be able to meet the higher monthly charges when their Adjustable Rate Mortgages reset to higher rates.] Homeowners whose loans are in these pools would receive newly issued loans with fixed interest rates, currently 6.14 percent, and 30-year terms. Under this plan, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would issue debt to pay off the outstanding principal on the loans and then guarantee the new ones.

Voilà: Investors who own the underlying interests in the mortgages would be fully repaid and the securitizations would be closed out.

The return of government

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:46:53 -0600

Columnist Robyn Blumner:

If you want to give a name to the coming era in American politics, you could call it the Return of Government.

I think of the years between the time that John F. Kennedy told us to ask what we can do for our country and the aftermath of 9/11 when President Bush told us all to go shopping as modern historical bookends of sorts. Kennedy arrived at about the apex of people's faith in the power of the state to make lives better. Bush arrived at its nadir. [...]

There was a time when government was expected to act in furtherance of the common good and was given the benefit of the doubt when sacrifice was called for. That time is coming back. It's the only viable option there is.

The Salt Lake County Blue Army wants YOU!!

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:06:52 -0600

Join the Blue Army!

About this group
26 members, members can post, anyone can join, only members can read

Description: The Salt Lake County Blue Army is a collaborative group of volunteers willing to lend their support in building a stronger, better Salt Lake County Democratic Party. Having more Democrats in Utah will help all of us no matter where we live to help balance extreme Republican domination.

"The Conscience of a Liberal": The Buzzflash interview with Paul Krugman

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:20:55 -0600

I finally got around to reading Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, and it's just as excellent as you'd expect. The following excerpts are from an interview Krugman did with Buzzflash about the book:

Paul Krugman: The reason that Bush is so opposed to SCHIP is the same reason he was so determined to privatize Social Security, which is that they're both programs that work. You have to understand, that is the point of view of somebody who really wants to undo the New Deal — and if possible — I quote Grover Norquist in the book — get things back to the way they were before Teddy Roosevelt and the "Socialists" came in. The worst thing is a government program that actually does help people. So the SCHIP is a really bad thing, from Bush's point of view, because it works so well. It might lead people to say, well, if we can do this for lower-income children, why can't we do it for lots of other people who need guaranteed health care? So it's the determination, on his part, to do this veto, even though there's a short-term political cost, because they're deathly afraid that people will look at SCHIP and say, gee, actually the government can do some good. [...]

BuzzFlash: We want to challenge you a little on some language. […] You used the word "conservatism," though you switch and say

A complex society requires effective government

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:39:00 -0600

Glenden Brown at OneUtah uses the current water crisis in Atlanta, Georgia, to examine the failure of conservative ideology:

The bottom line: We live in a complex society that requires intelligent planning, foresight and effective government to mediate between competing private interests and to organize and manage the infrastructure. The basic infrastructure needed to operate a modern city is mind-bogglingly complex — a series of interconnected systems that require constant maintenance, upgrades, changes and improvements. The engineering feats required to simply install an effective sewer system for Salt Lake County's million residents staggers the imagination. When it works smoothly, we don't notice it. When it fails, it does so spectacularly. […]

Hostility to government — part and parcel of the conservative ideology — creates its own problems. Throughout the US, thirty years of conservative anti-government, anti-tax madness has created

Americans 'want government to do things'

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:41:30 -0600

George Packer in The New Yorker explains why conservatism was doomed to fail:

That November [1994], Republicans swept to power in Congress and imagined that they had been deputized by the voters to distill conservatism into its purest essence. Newt Gingrich declared, "On those things which are at the core of our philosophy and on those things where we believe we represent the vast majority of Americans, there will be no compromise." Instead of just limiting government, the Gingrich revolutionaries set out to disable it. Although the legislative reins were in their hands, these Republicans could find no governmental projects to organize their energy around. David Brooks said, "The only thing that held the coalition together was hostility to government." When the Times Magazine asked William Kristol what ideas he was for — in early 1995, high noon of the Gingrich Revolution — Kristol could think to mention only school choice and "shaping the culture."

At the end of that year, when the radical conservatives in the Gingrich Congress shut down the federal government, they learned that the American public was genuinely attached to the modern state. "An anti-government philosophy turned out to be politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American," Brooks said. "People want something melioristic, they want government to do things."

If you find Packer's article interesting, you can download an interview with him on Radio West with Doug Fabrizio (look for the yellow box labeled MP3).

An Economy Based on Bets

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:55:09 -0600

Michael Greenberger on
Fresh Air:

Should we have an economy based on whether people make good or bad bets - or should we have an economy where people build companies, create manufacturing interests, do inventions, advance the American society, make it more productive? This economy is based on people sitting at their computers making bets all day long... We are rewarding people for sitting at their computers and punching in bets. That's not the way this economy is going to be built. India and China, with their focus on science and industry and building real businesses, are going to eat our lunch unless the American public wakes up and puts an end to an economy that praises and makes heroes out of speculators.

Bush refuses to appoint regulators who will regulate

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:06:15 -0600

And, as a result, Senate Democrats are refusing to confirm Bush's appointments (The Politico):

At the height of concern over product safety and lead-tainted toys, the Consumer Product Safety Commission doesn't have enough members to meet. The nation is facing the prospect of a presidential contest with no referee, because the Federal Election Commission is too short-handed to call a quorum. With the economy in peril, the Council of Economic Advisers is plodding along with a lone member. The National Labor Relations Board, the body that adjudicates disputes between workers and bosses, has only two of its five commissioners still on the job. [...]

President Bush squarely blames the Senate for failing to give his nominees an "up or down vote."

Democrats respond that some of his nominees are flatly unacceptable and that the president hasn't sought the "advice and consent" of the Senate.

Democrats charge that the federal commissions are not innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire between the White House and the Senate, but rather are targets of an administration happy to watch them die. "They could[n't] care less," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, where many of Bush's stalled nominations sit. "They dislike government. They dislike the way government works."

The sad part is that either bad regulators or no regulators is fine with Bush.

Most Utahns want ethics reforms for legislators

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:21:37 -0700

Deseret News:

Three in four Utahns favor reform of ethics laws that affect gift-giving by lobbyists to legislators, conflicts of interest and lawmakers' conversion of campaign funds to personal use, a new Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll shows.

But lawmakers say such reforms are unlikely to pass anytime soon.

"House Democrats ran reform packages for years. But with the exception of a few innocuous and ineffective changes, nothing passed," said House Minority Leader Brad King, D-Price.

I think it's worthwhile for Dems to include ethics reforms as one of their issues; however, I do wonder how many voters will be swayed by this issue alone.

Bush trusts you, unless you want an effective government

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:45:10 -0700

Editorial from the LA Times:

Two themes ran through President Bush's final State of the Union address Monday night, as he made the case for his continued relevance: Trust the American people, he said – again and again – and empower them to run their own lives. Trust the people with their money, and the economy will come around. Trust them to demand better schools, and schools will improve. Trust scientists to think big about global warming, and they will hit on solutions. All of that is fine, and yet for all of Bush's trust in the American people, he also made clear that he lacks essential confidence in their government – his government. [...]

Government is not the passive instrument of bureaucrats. It is the active agent of a democratic people. When the people genuinely need its help, the government should act, not merely encourage. In this, Bush has failed to give his nation what it needs. Too many Americans face the loss of homes, too many are in prison. Afghanistan is unstable, Iran threatens. Osama bin Laden is still at large.

Ours is, a great president once proclaimed, "a government of the people, by the people, for the people." This president has done too little to uphold that conviction.

'Pro-government conservatives' reject the GOP's anti-government jihad

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:54:50 -0700

I never thought I'd link approvingly to an article by right-wing clown Jonah Goldberg, but I guess there's a first time for everything (Washington Post):

Conservatism, quite simply, is a mess these days. Conservative attitudes are changing. Or, more accurately, the attitudes of people who call themselves conservatives are changing.

The most cited data to prove this point come from the Pew Political Typology survey. By 2005, it had found that so many self-described conservatives were in favor of government activism that they had to come up with a name for them. "Running-dog liberals" apparently seemed too pejorative, so the survey went with "pro-government conservatives," a term that might have caused Ronald Reagan to spontaneously combust. This group makes up just under 10 percent of registered voters and something like a third of the Republican coalition. Ninety-four percent of pro-government conservatives favored raising the minimum wage, as did 79 percent of self-described social conservatives. Eight out of 10 pro-government conservatives believe that the government should do more to help the poor and slightly more than that distrust big corporations.

Regarding Mike Huckabee, Goldberg adds:

He would even use his power as president to push for a national ban on public smoking. "I'm one of the few Republicans," Huckabee insists, "who talk very clearly about the environment, health care, infrastructure, energy independence. I don't cede any of those to the Democrats."

So about a third of Republicans think we shouldn't drown government in the bathtub. It's past time for national Dems to start unapologetically making the case that our government can be a force for good.

What government does for you, every day

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:31:15 -0600

governmentisgood.com:

Ask yourself this question: "What has government done for me lately?" If you are like most Americans, you will probably answer: "Not much." Surveys show that 52% of Americans believe that "government programs have not really helped me and my family." But let's see if that is really true. Let's examine a typical day in the life of an average middle-class American and try to identify some of the ways that government improves that person's life during that 24 hour period. [...]

6:38 a.m. You go into the kitchen for breakfast. You pour some water into your coffeemaker. You simply take for granted that this water is safe to drink. But in fact you count on your city water department to constantly monitor the quality of your water and to immediately take measures to correct any potential problems with this vital resource.

6:39 a.m. You flip the switch on the coffee maker. There is no short in the outlet or in the electrical line and there is no resulting fire in your house. Why? Because when your house was being built, the electrical system had to be inspected to make sure it was properly installed — a service provided by your local government. And it was installed by an electrician who was licensed by your state government to ensure his competence and your safety. [...]

7:45 a.m. You put a couple of letters in your mailbox. For less than the price of a cup of coffee, a government employee will come to your house, pick up the letters, and have them delivered in a few days to someone on the other side of the country. A pretty good deal.

Don't forget the profit

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:03:15 -0600

Ezra Klein at Tapped has a reminder for us all:

Forgetting all other considerations, when evaluating whether a good or service is better provided by the public or private sectors, you have to keep in mind the private sector's need to turn a profit. So if company X is 6% more efficient than the government at doing something, but will take a 12% cut for profit, you're better off leaving the service in public hands.