Bacon's Rebellion

Courtesy of The Roanoke Times. It’s interesting that both Connaughton and Baril are trying to run as conservatives. Someone ought to tell these guys that “I will reinstate the car tax” Russ Potts–who’s running to the left of Tim Kaine–has got their number…

Today’s Washington Post covers the 67th District race in the Republican primary, between RINO-incumbent Gary Reese and the challenger, Chris Craddock.

What struck me in this story is that Reese says that taxes are not on the minds of the voters. He claims that in going door-to-door people talk to him about transportation, education, and maybe property taxes–but certainly no state tax issues.

That’s interesting because all the door-to-door experiences of the challengers point to a great voter frustration with the overall tax situation.

So is Reese downplaying the issue to justify his John Kerry like vote? — he actually voted for the tax increase before voting against it!

Or is it possible that Reese is partially right? Are voters primarily frustrated with property taxes going through the roof? If so, will they differentiate between state and local tax issues or will they go to the polls on June 14 and vote the rascals out of office?

“Liberal Democrats famously fancy themselves champions of tolerance, sensitivity, and diversity, yet they embrace an intolerant orthodoxy that manifests some fundamentally racist attitudes and assumptions. There is no more racist assumption than one that imputes particular beliefs to a variety of men and women in a variety of places with many different interests, values, and backgrounds simply on the basis of race. The great novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston didn’t just speak to me, she spoke for me: “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, or lurking behind my eyes….I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that Nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt by it….No, I do not weep at the world―I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” –Former Delegate Paul Harris

From ‘Notes from the sausage factory,’ Barnie Day, Becky Dale editors, publishing mid-July, 450 pages, Brunswick Books

Okay, fellow Dems, listen up. In the best spirit of bipartisanship, it falls our duty to help our addled Republican friends choose who will be their candidate for Governor in November by voting in the June 14 Republican Primary. That’s right, as a Democrat you can vote in the Republican Primary. We’re having two that day, simultaneously–one for the Ds and one for the Rs. (And, no, this doesn’t threaten the Sage of the Shenandoah–Russ Potts will be on the ballot either way.) It doesn’t change your registration. You don’t have to swear to anything. Just tell the folks at your polling place you want the Republican ballot. They have to let you vote in the Republican Primary if you want to. Hey, our ticket is largely set, with Kaine and Deeds. (That middle one will sort out.) This time around, we need to be helping our Republican friends out. There will be two names in the Republican ballot for Governor–Jerry Kilgore and George Fitch. Lord, have mercy! What must we do?

“If we, collectively, are the source of authority for our government, we must have a way to communicate our instructions. We must be able to select the representatives we think can best implement our will; we need to be able to change them, reorganize them if need be, and decide how they will conduct our business.

“Most importantly, we must reach some approximate agreement about what we want, and that is done by placing people, initiatives and referenda on the ballot and casting our votes on them.” (Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 17, 1788)

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of coffee, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised. All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance – now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat
because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry. In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo.His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath.The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting his air. He walks to the subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work: It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation,which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor. Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union. > If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed,he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune. It’s noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FDIC > because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression. Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards.He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification. He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to. Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day.Joe agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives!” Joe says out loud to himself. “After all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.” (Thanks to Margie Clark)

Tim Kaine has matched Jerry Kilgore’s health care plan with one of his own. According to the May 27 edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the thrust of his plan is to encourage small businesses to offer medical insurance to their employees and, thus, reduce the huge number of Virginians–one out of seven–lacking healthcare coverage. Strategically, the idea is sound. The best way to increase access to the healthcare system is to encourage more businesses to offer medical insurance. The devil is in the details.

Kaine wants to use tax credits to encourage small businesses to offer the coverage. I’m wary of expanding the use of tax credit when Jerry Kilgore recommends them to advance his healthcare plan, and I’m wary when Tim Kaine recommends them. Kaine admits this his proposal could cost the state as much as $250 million a year if all small businesses signed on. His argument that the state would recoup some of that money through lower Medicaid pay-outs doesn’t hold water. The plan would benefit only working Virginians, and working Virginians don’t qualify for Medicaid.

By relying on tax credits, Kaine avoids confronting the reasons why health insurance are unaffordable to begin with. One reason is that Virginia mandates more medical benefits in a health insurance plan than almost any other state. Insurance companies are restricted by state law from offering an affordable, “bare bones” policy that covers only essential medical needs at a lower price. That leaves working class Virginians with a choice between a gold-plated plan and… nothing. That’s the underlying problem, and Kaine needs to address it directly

Kaine’s second idea is a good one. He would encourage the creation of voluntary insuance pools that would allow small businesses to spread risk and buy insurance more affordably. According to the Times-Dispatch, “He said he will work to overturn legal restraints that keep trade associations from starting their own insurance pools.” Now that’s addressing an underlying problem. As is so often the case, some kind of government rule or regulation is interfering with the workings of the marketplace.

“We must remember that religion is a universal sentiment which is inside everybody and has been inside every person since the beginning of the world. It is not something which we must give to the child” ~ Maria Montessori

The latest from the Liberator Online:

“Public schools are government-established, politician- and bureaucrat-controlled, fully politicized, taxpayer-supported, authoritarian socialist institutions. In fact, the public-school system is one of the purest examples of socialism existing in America…“If freedom is to survive in America, it will be necessary to eliminate the psychologically crippling and mentally debilitating authoritarian socialist public-school system that inevitably inflicts upon all of its students a long and thorough indoctrination in authoritarianism and convinces them that government force is a valid and necessary means to achieve virtually any desired ends. “This must be replaced with a system involving freedom and democracy; that is, a system of individual choice known as free enterprise in which students would actually be genuine customers, patronizing genuine education businesses.” ~ Thomas L. Johnson, professor emeritus of biological sciences at the University of Mary Washington. From an op-ed in the September 26, 2004, issue of The Free Lance-Star.
…………………

In December 2005, The Virginia Family Foundation distributed an email titled ‘Information Alert: VEA pushes homosexual agenda in schools’, the FF goes on to say “the Virginia Education Association (VEA), the Virginia component of the National Education Association, had as one of its ten legislative goals for 2005 the repeal of the Marriage Affirmation Act, HB751.”

Last week, The Family Foundation warned, “The VEA is now exposed for what it accurately is – a condensed version of the left-wing National Education Association. The VEA has moved outside of the academic realm and is now working to redefine marriage for American families. Action needs to be taken to confine the VEA to its educational sphere and to prevent it from meddling in social issues.”

Blue Dog Note: It’s going to be interesting to see who will be denied VEA contributions, or the support of the Family Foundation in the 2005 election based on a single social issue — Gay Marriages. So, due to liberal and conservative socially-engineered contributions, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that while hard work and knowledge will get you close, and attitude will get you there, it’s the special interests questionnaires that will put you in the General Assembly.

It’s not a case of ‘old school’, but ‘new math’ — Don’t you agree?

~ the blue dog

From today’s Washington Post, “Many Buyers Opt for Risky Mortgages“: More than one third of the mortgages written in the Washington metro area this year are interest-only mortgages, loans that allow home buyers to pay back only the interest while delaying payment on the loan principal for years. Housing prices have gotten so exorbitant that home buyers are turning to these risky mortgages as a way to cut their payments to a level they can afford.

Explains the Post: “The loans are attractive because their initial monthly payments are tantalizingly low — about $1,367 a month for a $320,000 mortgage, compared with about $1,842 a month for a traditional 30-year, fixed-rate loan. If home prices fall, though, borrowers could lose big.”

This kind of flimsy financing is a sure sign of a market top. I was warning about the real estate bubble in November 2003, but I didn’t have a sense then of imminent danger. I do now. (Ed Risse reads the tea leaves similarly. Read his more detailed treatment in “The Shelter Crisis.”) Housing prices cannot increase at a sustained rate of 20 percent per year, as they have in Northern Virginia, or even 10 percent a year, as they have elsewhere, when personal incomes are increasing at the rate of 5 or so percent per year. The collapse is inevitable, and when it comes, it’s going to cause a lot of pain. Many, many homeowners, especially the poor saps who put little money down, will find themselves with negative equity.

There will be tremendous political ramifications, too. Homeowners hate rising property taxes, but they’re willing to swallow them when property values are rising. I may be paying an extra $1,000 a year in taxes this year, but my house just increased $15,000 in value. I can always borrow against my increased equity. Once property values drop, local governments will face a crisis. They will have to increased property tax rates dramatically to compensate for falling assessments. But as homeowners see their net worth shrinking, they will find their taxes to be far more burdensome. Just as a collapse in housing prices is inevitable, particularly in Northern Virginia, so is the political upheaval that inevitably will follow.

Sabato on referenda, the Free Lance Star, 5-23-05:

“Now, Virginia is not a populist state. But this rhetoric seems to be taking hold to a degree, dangerously so in my opinion. This is not Jeffersonian Jefferson was violently opposed to anything like initiative and referendum.”

And this:

“Referendum and initiative don’t work very well. It’s controlled by special interests and big money,” Sabato said. “It’s had exactly the opposite effect that the progressives thought it would have. It’s another bad reform idea that sounds good.”

Kilgore says Jefferson got it wrong. I don’t think so.

Chris Flores of the Daily Press has a lot of new information on a story Jim Bacon highlighted earlier in the week–a procurement lawsuit against the Virginia Department of Education.

In a nutshell, it appears the Department of Education awarded a contract to a firm called “Teachers” for a special education teacher recruitment website in 2002. No information is given on how many bids were solicited or received. One year later, the Department apparently decided it wanted a more comprehensive website, so it put out a bid. It appears, from Flores’ reporting, that only Teachers bid on it until the Department, mandated to seek a minority bidder, solicited a bid from E & E. Those were the only two bids received. E & E was the low bidder and from there a series of alleged actions designed to swing the contract to Teachers occurred, leading to the lawsuit. I hope the courts are able to fairly sort it all out; the allegations are serious.

I don’t know all the ins and outs of procurement regulations, but it boggles my mind that in a world where web designers and developers are a dime a dozen, only two bids were received. That’s why I wonder how many bids were received on the 2002 solicitation. Once you get a contract with a state agency, it’s natural that you would have some advantage on additional, similar contracts under the “reinvent the wheel” principle. It’s noteworthy that the Department of Education decided to create a whole new website, instead of modifying/enhancing the existing site that Teachers had established. (As a snide aside, I wonder how many individuals from the Department of Education’s bloated bureaucracy had input into this website. I guess one of them couldn’t be a web designer who would do it “in-house.”)

The “system” seemed to work, if you consider that the Department of Education, as required and cajoled to do, set out on its own to get a minority bidder when no minority bidder responed what probably was a public solicitation. Showing what this lawsuit is really about, however, is this from the plaintiff’s attorney, H. Scott Johnson, Jr.:

Teachers has used the Virginia contract to win work in other states, which is precisely what E&E wanted to do, says the lawsuit, which asks for compensation for those damages.

“They put a lot of time and money and effort into it because they were going to use it as a springboard to win contracts in other states,” Johnson said.

So many government troughs, so little time.

At last, there’s something we can ALL agree upon: It’s bad public policy to provide Medicaid reimbursement for Viagara and other erectile dysfunction drugs to sex offenders. No one–not Jesse Jackson, not even the A.C.L.U. — objected when Gov. Mark R. Warner signed an emergency regulation blocking the benefit for 52 of Virginia’s registered offenders. The very idea of subsidizing the libido of sex offenders is so ludicrous that only a government bureaucracy acting on auto-pilot or the satirical Web publication The Onion — one of today’s headlines: “Bush Caught in One of His Own Terror Traps“) — could have come up with it.

But there’s a larger question: Why is Medicaid subsidizing erectile dysfunction drugs for anyone?

According to Frank Green’s story in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimate that Medicaid spends about $38 million a year nationally on erectile dysfunction drugs. With about one out of 40 U.S. residents living in the Old Dominion, that would imply about $1 million a year paid here in Virginia.

Medicaid is busting the state budget. Shouldn’t we be husbanding our finite resources for long-term care of the infirm, and for treatment of serious illnesses among the poor rather than for a lifestyle enhancement? Given our parlous fiscal circumstances, paying public dollars to buy Viagara for anyone is a scandal.

Unfortunately, Gov. Warner cannot sign a bill simply payments to the broader Medicaid population. Virginia appears to be bound by a 1998 Medicaid order mandating coverage for the drugs. (I wonder whose lobbyist got that rule inserted?) Perhaps it’s time for Virginia’s congressional delegation to get to work on reversing that order.

Today I had the pleasure of lunch with Norm Leahy, proprietor of one my favorite blogs, One Man’s Trash. Our discussion was wide-ranging and animated, almost like being in the Bacon’s Rebellion comment section. We agreed that Jeff Schapiro was the gold standard in balanced political reporting, unmet needs is the great issue of our time, and Russ Potts’ double-decker highway idea was sheer genius.

Well, maybe I’m stretching our agreement.

In person, he was an impressive guy. Agree or disagree with him, he’s a unique voice in the blogosphere.

The quality of the roads in Virginia’s major metropolitan areas does not stack up very well to that of other cities, according to data compiled by The Road Information Project and published today in USA Today. According to a chart in USA Today, the “Virginia Beach” metro area and Washington. D.C. metro areas are in the middle of the pack–roughly in line with national averages, which are nothing to write home about. Richmond’s roads are measurably worse.

The numbers break out like this:

Virginia Beach: 28 percent good; 23 percent fair; 27 percent mediocre; 22 percent bad.

Washington, D.C.: 30 percent good; 17 percent fair; 28 percent mediocre; 24 percent bad.

Richmond: 18 percent good; 26 percent fair; 32 percent mediocre; 23 percent bad.

Now, go read Steve Haner’s column in Bacon’s Rebellion, “The Transportation SOLs,” which argues that spending on road maintenance is crowding out dollars for new construction. According to Steve’s numbers, maintenance will consume all state road dollars by 2018. (See chart.) I don’t know where he gets his numbers, and I don’t know how good they are because I haven’t had a chance to examine the assumptions embedded in them. But given that those are the only numbers we’ve got, and given the already mediocre condition of Virginia’s roads, it’s understandable why Virginia lawmakers believe we have a time bomb on our hands.