Washington State Ballot – Election 2010

Here’s the right way to vote on your ballot in the Washington State 2010 election.  This is the correct way to vote if you believe:

1. Government is too big.
2. Government borrows and spends and taxes too much.
3. Government is unwilling to prioritize spending (public safety, education, and other vital services first, then social programs and secondary priorities if there is any budget leftover).

No longer content with just being tax and spenders, the liberals in Washington state have opted for borrow and spend and tax.  The new scheme here is borrow money (debt), spend on pet projects, then tax to payoff the debt.  This must be stopped!

My ballot is in the 5th legislative district (LD) and 8th congressional district (CD) in Washington, so I focused to the votes on my ballot and included a few other key races.

• I-1053 – Yes to this limit on tax increases to require a super-majority (like I-601 and I-960).  See the chart below from Evergreen Freedom Foundation that shows where our government should be if the Democrats in state legislature and governor had not repealed I-601.

• I-1082 – Yes to this alternative to the government-run workers comp monopoly.
• I-1098 – No on this attempt to create the state’s first income tax.  It raises taxes, spending, increases class warfare and is bad for jobs in Washington state.
• I-1100 – Yes to end the state’s prohibition-era monopoly on liquor sales.
• I-1105 – No on this liquor sales initiative.  I-1100 is much better, and voting for only 1100 makes it clear what the law will be, while passing both could cause some unknown outcomes and/or delays. 
• I-1107 – Yes to repeal this crazy tax scheme.  Its overly-complex and enables the state to continue to waste money by spending this money.
• R-52 – Rejected this attempt to make the bottled-water tax permanent and take on more debt so legislators can keep spending. 
• SJR-8225 – Rejected as this is another attempt to increase the debt calculation (to enable them to spend even more).
• HJR-4220 – Approved to hopefully limit the risk of another Maurice Clemmons-type criminal by denying bail.  (This is not a tax/spend issue but for completeness I am including.)
• King County Amendment 1 – Yes on the change to the Charter preamble.  Appears to have no legislative impact, just clarifying the role of county government to enable/help rural communities in the county and not just Seattle.
• King County Amendment 2 – Yes to this efficiency update to campaign finance reporting.
• King County Amendment 3 – Lukewarm Yes on this new policy on collective bargaining to empower the sheriff with authority in CB process other than wages and benefits.
• King County Proposition 1 – Rejected on this tax increase to pay for first priorities.  Another example of failing to prioritize spending!
• Elected Office:
  • Dino Rossi (US Senate)
  • James Watkins (CD 1)
  • John Koster (CD 2)
  • Jaime Herrera (CD 3)
  • Doug Cloud (CD 6)
  • Dave Reichert (CD 8 )
  • Dick Muri (CD 9)
  • Jay Rodne (LD5 pos 1)
  • Glenn Anderson (LD5 pos 2)
  • Dan Satterberg (King Co Prosecutor)
  • Jim Johnson (State Supreme Court pos 1)
  • Richard B. Sanders (State Supreme Court pos 6)
  • All the others are either uncontested or people that I am not enthusiastically supporting.

For more on my review on the initiatives, see my WA State Informed Voter Guide.

Feel free to share your thoughts as well as educate me on other races I should learn about and advocate for.

-Brian

** Updated I-1105 to a NO vote and KC Amendment #1 to YES.

Washington State Informed Voter Guide

Here’s a great resource from the Evergreen Freedom Foundation called the Informed Voter Guide to learn more about the slate of initiatives in Washington state this year. 

My quick summary of the initiatives and my perspective on how to vote:

#	Description	Position	Comments	Links
1053	Reinstating the two-thirds legislative majority for tax and fee hikes	Approve	Return to the fiscal requirements of I-601.  Given the perpetual nature of the state’s democrats to spend on everything, we need all the help we can get to slow them down.	Favor Oppose
1082	Legalizing Private Industrial Insurance	Approve	Currently the State Labor & Industries has a monopoly on providing workers comp insurance.  This initiative will legalize competition with the state for workers comp insurance.	Favor Favor Oppose
1098	High-earner Income Tax	Reject	This is an Income Tax!  While today the promise is it will only apply to the rich (200K/year), it is a guarantee the definition of rich will change to include more middle-class and grow spending even more. If u believe the revenue from this initiative will go to a dedicated trust fund, you need to know that the state legislature already raided existing “trust funds” over 74 times in the last decade.	Favor Oppose Oppose
1100	Privatizing State Liquor Stores	Approve	Get the state out of its monopoly on selling alcohol and let the free market behave.  Feel free to increase liquor taxes later if there is an adverse revenue impact.	Favor Favor Oppose
1105	Revising State Liquor Laws	Approve	Similar to I-1100.  Worth supporting as well.	Favor Oppose
1107	Repealing Tax Increases on food and beverages	Approve	The tax scheme cooked up by the legislature on candy is too crazy and should be repealed.	Favor Oppose
R-52	Authorizing bonds in excess of the constitutional debt limit to finance energy efficiency projects in schools, and making the sales tax on bottled water permanent	Reject	Yet another attempt to raise money today (debt) in order to increase spending today and pay off down the road with higher taxes.  This is $505M today in new debt and spending which will ultimately cost taxpayers $937M.	(no good links)

If you are anti-tax, you support these initiatives: I-1053, I-1107; and oppose these initiatives: I-1098, R-52. 

If you are anti-spending, you oppose these initiatives: I-1098, R-52.

If you want to get the state out of monopoly business, support these initiatives: I-1082, I-1100, I-1105.

The core budget issue in the state (and the nation) is not too little tax, its too much spending.  And the biggest crisis in state spending is the cost of labor (unions and pensions).  This means confronting all state employees and both reducing the number of people employed by the state and the price per person.  It also means getting the state out of several monopoly businesses it is in.  This election season gives us an amazing opportunity to truly improve our government and focus on reducing spending and cost of government.

-Brian

Great Moments in Socialized Medicine

Starting a series to keep track of James Taranto’s excellent work on cataloguing what nationalized/socialized health care looks like in his Best of The Web Today column.

Controversial database signup required for proper treatment?:

Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
Britain’s National Health Service "is scaring patients into signing up to its controversial database–by claiming that those who refuse run the risk of receiving the wrong test results or the wrong drugs," reports London’s Daily Mail:

On the website for the NHS Connecting for Health agency, visitors are warned that if they opt out of the computerised "summary care record" scheme, they could suffer "adverse consequences," including "a delay or missed opportunity for correct treatment."

It says: "The NHS has significant problems now with lost records and test results and treatment and prescribing errors."

Connecting for Health’s strategy is controversial because it highlights the safety risks inherent in the current paper-based records system.

But critics argue that the dangers are not as high as the agency is suggesting.

Among those critics is former Enron adviser Paul Krugman: "In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false."

Meanwhile, the Edmonton Journal reports that "a 2½-year-old Alberta boy born with a severe malformation to the left side of his face is scheduled for surgery in New York on Friday, thanks to people across Canada who have donated money to pay for the expensive procedure":

Maddox Flynn was born with a cystic hygroma, a rare malformation of the lymphatic system that causes fluid-filled lesions to develop, usually in infancy.

When injection treatments failed to shrink Maddox’s cysts, local doctors told his parents there was nothing more they could do to help the little boy.

Now, Maddox has the chance to travel across the border for what his parents hope will be life-changing surgery.

The family has "applied to Alberta’s out-of-country health services committee for funding, but doesn’t expect a decision before the Friday appointment," the Journal reports:

Applicants to the out-of-country health services committee have to show the treatment is not available in Canada and that it is not an experimental treatment, said Alberta Health and Wellness spokesman John Tuckwell.

Maddox is lucky he was born before ObamaCare. Who knows if innovative treatments will be available even in America a few years hence?

Keep your eyes open for occasions when this comes to a medical provider near you.  When I have time, I will do my best to go back through Taranto’s archives to add the documented list of HCR pains here.

-Brian

The Promise and the Cost of Health Care Reform So Far…

Now that health care insurance reform bill has passed, its time to start tracking the promises and the impacts.

I plan on forming up a scorecard to make it easier to keep track of the expectations that President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid, and the rest of the democrats promised.

1. Premiums will go down
2. Businesses will see as much as $3000 per employee reduction in premiums per year.
3. You can keep your doctor and your plan
4. You will still get access to the best doctors and procedures
5. No bureaucrat will come between you and your doctor
6. 30 Million people currently without health insurance will become insured.
7. Pre-existing conditions will no longer be a barrier to insurance
8. No illegal immigrants will be covered

Impacts announced by businesses so far:

Boeing impact: 150 million

Caterpillar impact: 100 million

AT&T impact: 1 billion!

3M impact: 90 million

In chart form:

Company	Ticker	Charge ($mm)	Loss per Share
3M	MMM	$90	$0.12
AK Steel	AKS	$31	$0.28
Allegheny Technologies	ATI	$5	$0.05
AT&T	T	$1,000	NA
Boeing	BA	$150	$0.20
Caterpillar	CAT	$100	NA
Deere	DE	$150	NA
Goodrich	GR	$10	$0.08
Honeywell	HON	$13	$0.05
Illinois Tool Works	ITW	$22	$0.04
Lockheed Martin	LMT	$96	$0.25
Prudential Financial	PRU	$100	NA
Valero Energy	VLO	$15 to $20	NA
Ingersoll-Rand	IR	$41	$0.12

The reason for these charges is related to how the federal government (through the tax code) rewards or penalizes companies for paying for retiree prescription drug benefits.

Its possible to consider it a good or bad idea for the previous tax treatment versus the new one here.  However, its important to be honest about the impact of this law.  Of just those listed here, they are recognizing a total of 1.8 billion dollars in losses immediately as a result of this bill.  This means either a negative impact to stockholders/shareholders (diminished value, dividends, growth) or increasing prices to consumers, or most likely/simplest in this economy is to just cut jobs.  If you consider a good paying job with benefits and all the costs of that job as 180K per year, the impact to these 14 companies is 10,000 jobs likely to be lost.

This doesn’t even start into the impact on small business.  We’ll have to look at this part again.

Rejecting Bad Ideas, or Start of the Response to Obama?

I know most people predicted this would happen in California, but it will be interesting to see whether it portends greater political significance.

Calif. voters reject slate of propositions – More politics- msnbc.com

I think people are reacting to the global economic downturn that is taking impacting their retirement, their jobs, their families by trimming their own budgets.  I see most state and local governments doing the same, especially because they have a balanced budget requirement.  However, the Federal Govt is doing the opposite and I think the rejection of California’s plans for bigger government is the link to a potential brewing trend.  I do expect this will reverberate in other states and at the federal level. 

Some interesting races to watch, NJ and VA governor races (Nov 2009) and obviously the 2010 cycle.

If its a good idea for the newspapers?

You have to ask the question, if its a good idea to extend a tax break for the “state’s troubled newspaper industry” why isn’t a good idea for all the other companies that have had to react to this tough economy in ways similar to the newspaper’s actions:

Newspapers across the country have resorted to layoffs and other cost-cutting moves to deal with a wounded business model and a recession-fueled drop in advertising.

Just last week Microsoft did the second round of layoffs it announced in January of 5000 positions. 

If its not a good idea to extend this tax cut to all these businesses, why not?  Is it the government choosing favored businesses to bestow benefits upon?  Even the article acknowledges the governor is choosing her favorites:

The new law gives newspaper printers and publishers a 40 percent cut in the state’s main business tax. The discounted rate mirrors breaks given in years past to the Boeing Co. and the timber industry.

A simple man, such as myself, would suggest if its good for Boeing, the timber industry, and now newspapers, why not all other companies and industries?