Even with perfect turn-out, it still screws over the median voter. Let's naively assume that political views are naively evenly distributed along some ideology score from -1 to 1, with Democrats being those below zero and Republicans being above zero.
In a primary system with full turnout, you'd expect the winners to reflect the median Democrat and median Republican, with ideology scores of -.5 and.5. The Median voter would prefer someone with an ideology score of zero.
"If I were to only vote for candidates that I agreed with 100%, then in every election I would have to write in my own name. Every time you vote for a person, you're exhibiting at least a certain amount of strategic behavior.
I disagree with your statement beyond that, though. Democracy is not every person or every small interest group splintering into the People's Front of Judea vs. the Judean People's Front and then complaining about the system when they don't cross the same vote threshold that a combined PFJ/JPF party would have garnered.
Real democracy acknowledges that we're a pluralistic society with a broad range of views, and that for the government to do anything worthwhile, people who hold opposing views on certain issues are going to have to work together. If you have a minority viewpoint that you want to advance, you do so by convincingly arguing your natural allies of the worthiness of your position and working with them, not by alienating them and poisoning the well by helping to get worse alternatives (like Bush) elected."
The latest poll, a poll of Likely Voters, has Obama at 46-53 approve disapprove. Another poll, a poll of eligible Adults, shows Obama at 47-46 approve disapprove. That's a 7 point difference in disapproval!
The gap between LV and RV polls is known in polling circles as the "enthusiasm gap", and it tends to be a lot higher in mid-terms then presidential elections. The gap has consistently favored Republicans for the last 30 years, mainly because Rich people are much more likely to turn out then poor people.
No. They don't. The truth is, that the week before the election, you can see election polls and do a pretty good job at estimating each candidate's probability of winning.
There has never, *ever*, been a candidate behind by more then 15 points in the polls and won in a federal Senate, Governor, or Presidential election. Ever. And that's a big sample-size, there have been 2500 such races since 1980 (66 Senate/Governor races every two years, 50 state level presidential polls every four years).
Those who vote for 3rd party candidates anyway are self-righteous douche-bags who don't actually care about the people they're trying to help. (Like the Nader voters who caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq).
Look at the graph. You need around 20k representatives for the bias to disappear. That's a lot, especially because we would need to do this on a state and county level too. We don't want a non-trivial percentage of our smart people becoming politicians! Proportional representation or multi-member districts are a much better idea.
More generally, I don't think your concerns are not very valid. People don't like hearing this, but public opinion is effectively one dimensional (That's an empirical statement, one dimension can explain 98% of the variation in roll call matrices). There are many theoretical reasons you wouldn't want local representation anyway
For example, there are a bunch of issues with locally distributed benefits but highly distributed costs, so that it makes a lot of sense for one representative to push for the policy, and not much sense for others to oppose it, even if the policy is bad overall for the country. Every district has this sort of thing, and so it's common for representatives to "log-roll", agreeing to vote on each other's wasteful projects. Examples would be agricultural subsidies, wasteful military bases and weapons systems that even the army doesn't want, and earmarks.
You really think the CIA is suppressing the number of atheists in Bulgaria?
If Bulgaria is anything like Russia or the rest of Eastern Europe, then people's religious identity is a bit fluid. Perfectly non-religious people will still respond that they are eastern orthodox. It's more of a cultural then a religious thing.
As for communism and religion: I'm not religious myself, but the Soviets did a lot more then taking away the power of the church. They killed priests, destroyed churches, only elevated religious people to power...
No. Learn to read. The issue is that Democrats all live close together, while Republicans don't as much. So even if the vote is split 50-50, the Republicans get more Seats.
This isn't theoretical. Democrats got 52% of the congressional vote in Florida and 38% of the seats in 2008.
You can see how such a system screws over the median voter though. The Democratic candidate represents the median Democrat, and the Republican one the median Republican, each of which are far to the left or right of the median voter. This is why the DWNominate ideology scores of senators and congressman are highly bimodal, IE, the most liberal Republican is far to the right of the most conservative Democrat.
This wasn't true for a long time, and the rise of the primary system has a lot to do with that.
The situation is more complicated then you think. A "fair" system will, on average, give Republicans 58% of the seats with 50% of the votes due to the presence of lopsided Democratic urban districts and a lack of correspondingly lopsided Republican ones. You need weird looking districts that start in the city and tendril out to the suburbs if you want a representative legislature.
Eh. Democrats were mostly ahead in polls of registered voters and definitely ahead in polls of adults. Turnout is a lot lower in mid-term elections, and rich and upper-middle class people (Who generally are Republican, check the Exit polls), are far more likely to vote.
I know, this seems like a cop-out, but there's quite a bit of literature confirming that political opinions generally don't change. Most of the variation from election to election is driven by changes in turnout, not persuasion. There were very few people who voted for Obama in 2008 and then decided to vote for Republicans, most of the shift was due to Republicans voting who didn't vote in 2008 and Democrats who voted in 2008 and didn't vote in 2010.
Unfortunately, that's bullshit. Elections effect the lives and wellbeing of millions if not billions of people. Every voter has a strong moral responsibility to vote in a way that actually leads to the best outcome. Usually, this means voting for the best electable candidate.
"Think about why Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, especially since he doesn't try to optimize it, and get back to me on that one. Think about how W2 earners pay taxes versus people that own real estate or stocks. If he actually just got a W2 check for $100M, he'd be well ahead of his secretary on his marginal rate "
Yes, but Warren Buffet isn't representative of most rich people! Warren Buffet's job is to accrue capital gains. That's actually fairly rare.
On average, capital gains makes up 14% of total income for people in the top.1% of the income distribution. That's a lot more then the average American, but still, income taxation is going to wring a lot more from the very rich then capital gains taxes will.
At the same time, capital gains taxes really are not a very good idea. Laffer curve issues come up at far lower rates then income taxes, which is why even European countries tend to keep them low. I want to hit Warren Buffet too, but we should do so
with robust estate taxes and possibly a very progressive consumption tax (Not a VAT! Look it up before you call me an idiot.).
So yes, raising income taxes would take more from the rich then raising capital gains, Warren Buffet aside. At the same time, there's an enormous amount of evidence that the dead-weight loss from capital gains taxes are higher then from income taxes.
"Or efficiency could be increased. Given that we're wasting up to half our money on the biggest expenditure the federal government has (Medicare+Medicaid),"
Medicare is the most efficient health provider in the country after the VA. Unless you want to implement an NHS style health-care system, I don't see where your 50% figure comes from.
Even if we did, we still have lower taxes then most of the OECD. We have pension shortfalls, crumbling infrastructure, a massively unequal educational system, etc. Taxes need to go up.
"Lol, you use Amazon's stats for rich people instead of just looking at political donations like I did? If that's the level of rigor to bring to all of your thought processes, no wonder you feel the way you do."
No, I'm quoting Professor Gelman's work on the relationship between income and voting. He runs a popular statistics blog and wrote a famous book on the subject.
Basic reading comprehension shows that the maps don't come from Amazon sales pattern,they derived their map from a sophisticated Bayesian multi-level model based on data from the National Annenberg Election Survey with over 100,000 respondents. The book is available on google books, and google scholar could show you most of the papers.
That seems a bit more rigorous then looking at political donations, due to the presence of bundling, don't you think?
I mean, you can be creative by looking at stated contributions from billionaires. Or you can look at over-all corporate contributions to Republicans far outnumber those to Democrats.
If you want to look at individual contribution, then you can look at the distribution of donation size for the Obama and McCain campaign. We both know how that would turn out.
"And again, it's not like tax cuts are a bad thing anyway. We pay enough as it is."
Not by any objective standard, no. As the population ages, taxes need to increase when most government spending is directed toward extremely popular programs for the elderly.
I understand how tax-dynamics work. Regardless, you made a claim that the rich don't care about income taxation when, objectively, tax cuts benefit them the most.
"Point is that high economic growth with extreme debt accumulation seems like it's not quite a fair comparison. Granted, the US has a pretty large debt, too, but the US is actually below a lot of countries as far as debt as a percentage of GDP. [wikipedia.org] A LOT of countries are above the US, including Norway, Netherlends, Brazil, UK, Germany, Canada, France, Portugal, Greece, Italy, France, and Japan.'
Sure, but their-debt to GDP rations are roughly constant. They go up during recessions, and go down during booms. Krugman had a graph showing such at some point. In general, their debt trajectory has been downward in the last 20 years.
"As for the states going bankrupt, I'm not sure if they would or not. They would be able to do things that the state governments aren't allowed to do if they were their own countries, too. (I'm not defending the states, by the way. heh.)"
They would! Greece is a basket case, but if you look at Spain, their government didn't do anything wrong. They maintained large surpluses for years, and were railroaded by the crisis. Once doube-digit unemployment hit them, that caused their economic problems. Large drops in revenue cause debt crises. If Spain had it's own currency, it could devalue to encourage export-driven growth. But it can't, and so they're suffering from overly
The macro-economic situation in Nevada is just as bad as it is in Spain, probably worse. It's just that the Federal government has been throwing money at them in the form of medicaid, unemployment, stimulus, tax-subsidized muni-bonds, and an implicit guarantee on their debt.
These are called fiscal transfers, and any successful currency union needs them in order to conduct an effective monetary policy.
"My point is: if all those European-"centric" countries are doing so well economically, why are they running such a high debt? We always hear about the huge US debt, but it seems to be smaller than most European debts. Maybe that's why some people in the US are so against certain European political methods?"
It's a dumb argument. The group of nations I was implicitly referring to, the Nordic block(Sweden, Norway, Denmark), has considerably lower debt then the US. Their model is pretty clear: High spending, high taxes, and very few regulations(Their tax code is roughly two paragraphs, and they rank well above the US in the "ease of doing business ranking").
It's led to higher growth, a higher GDP/capita, a higher median income, a better educated populace, well-functioning public transit in every city, and lower income inequality and higher social mobility then the United States. It would improve outcomes for roughly 98% of the population.
It doesn't happen in the US because the the rich don't like the higher taxes, a big chunk of the middle class looks at social spending as a evil plot to take their money and give it to dark people (I'm not being glib, opposition to social spending is pretty well correlated to standard measures of racial resentment like "Immigrants have made this country worse off"), and businesses love the complicated set of regulations and taxes that keeps away competitors.
If Nevada, Michigan, and Florida were their own countries they'd have gone bankrupt too. That's more the fault of the EU's lack of fiscal stabilizers then anything else.
In terms of nominal GDP per capita, we're on par with most European countries, whomever is ahead depends mainly on whatever exchange rates are at the time.
It terms of median income, most of the Western European countries are on par or ahead of us consistently, and work less hours.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll get well-balanced candidates if the system encourages it. Jungle primaries will do it.
In a primary system with full turnout, you'd expect the winners to reflect the median Democrat and median Republican, with ideology scores of -.5 and .5. The Median voter would prefer someone with an ideology score of zero.
"If I were to only vote for candidates that I agreed with 100%, then in every election I would have to write in my own name. Every time you vote for a person, you're exhibiting at least a certain amount of strategic behavior.
I disagree with your statement beyond that, though. Democracy is not every person or every small interest group splintering into the People's Front of Judea vs. the Judean People's Front and then complaining about the system when they don't cross the same vote threshold that a combined PFJ/JPF party would have garnered.
Real democracy acknowledges that we're a pluralistic society with a broad range of views, and that for the government to do anything worthwhile, people who hold opposing views on certain issues are going to have to work together. If you have a minority viewpoint that you want to advance, you do so by convincingly arguing your natural allies of the worthiness of your position and working with them, not by alienating them and poisoning the well by helping to get worse alternatives (like Bush) elected."
The latest poll, a poll of Likely Voters, has Obama at 46-53 approve disapprove. Another poll, a poll of eligible Adults, shows Obama at 47-46 approve disapprove. That's a 7 point difference in disapproval!
The gap between LV and RV polls is known in polling circles as the "enthusiasm gap", and it tends to be a lot higher in mid-terms then presidential elections. The gap has consistently favored Republicans for the last 30 years, mainly because Rich people are much more likely to turn out then poor people.
There's a supreme court ruling that the districts need to be contiguous. Still, why do it randomly? We could do it by income! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/05/AR2010020501446.html
Yup, a lot like multi-member districts. They exist and would do a lot to solve the problem, but they're currently illegal under the civil rights act.
There has never, *ever*, been a candidate behind by more then 15 points in the polls and won in a federal Senate, Governor, or Presidential election. Ever. And that's a big sample-size, there have been 2500 such races since 1980 (66 Senate/Governor races every two years, 50 state level presidential polls every four years).
Those who vote for 3rd party candidates anyway are self-righteous douche-bags who don't actually care about the people they're trying to help. (Like the Nader voters who caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq).
More generally, I don't think your concerns are not very valid. People don't like hearing this, but public opinion is effectively one dimensional (That's an empirical statement, one dimension can explain 98% of the variation in roll call matrices). There are many theoretical reasons you wouldn't want local representation anyway
For example, there are a bunch of issues with locally distributed benefits but highly distributed costs, so that it makes a lot of sense for one representative to push for the policy, and not much sense for others to oppose it, even if the policy is bad overall for the country. Every district has this sort of thing, and so it's common for representatives to "log-roll", agreeing to vote on each other's wasteful projects. Examples would be agricultural subsidies, wasteful military bases and weapons systems that even the army doesn't want, and earmarks.
If Bulgaria is anything like Russia or the rest of Eastern Europe, then people's religious identity is a bit fluid. Perfectly non-religious people will still respond that they are eastern orthodox. It's more of a cultural then a religious thing.
As for communism and religion: I'm not religious myself, but the Soviets did a lot more then taking away the power of the church. They killed priests, destroyed churches, only elevated religious people to power...
There's a reason that religion surged after 91...
This isn't theoretical. Democrats got 52% of the congressional vote in Florida and 38% of the seats in 2008.
Primaries exist
This wasn't true for a long time, and the rise of the primary system has a lot to do with that.
Citation needed
The situation is more complicated then you think. A "fair" system will, on average, give Republicans 58% of the seats with 50% of the votes due to the presence of lopsided Democratic urban districts and a lack of correspondingly lopsided Republican ones. You need weird looking districts that start in the city and tendril out to the suburbs if you want a representative legislature.
I know, this seems like a cop-out, but there's quite a bit of literature confirming that political opinions generally don't change. Most of the variation from election to election is driven by changes in turnout, not persuasion. There were very few people who voted for Obama in 2008 and then decided to vote for Republicans, most of the shift was due to Republicans voting who didn't vote in 2008 and Democrats who voted in 2008 and didn't vote in 2010.
Mostly, yeah. They're not quite up to date, but the CIA world fact book is well known for being accurate.
Unfortunately, that's bullshit. Elections effect the lives and wellbeing of millions if not billions of people. Every voter has a strong moral responsibility to vote in a way that actually leads to the best outcome. Usually, this means voting for the best electable candidate.
Yes, but Warren Buffet isn't representative of most rich people! Warren Buffet's job is to accrue capital gains. That's actually fairly rare.
On average, capital gains makes up 14% of total income for people in the top .1% of the income distribution. That's a lot more then the average American, but still, income taxation is going to wring a lot more from the very rich then capital gains taxes will.
At the same time, capital gains taxes really are not a very good idea. Laffer curve issues come up at far lower rates then income taxes, which is why even European countries tend to keep them low. I want to hit Warren Buffet too, but we should do so with robust estate taxes and possibly a very progressive consumption tax (Not a VAT! Look it up before you call me an idiot.).
.
So yes, raising income taxes would take more from the rich then raising capital gains, Warren Buffet aside. At the same time, there's an enormous amount of evidence that the dead-weight loss from capital gains taxes are higher then from income taxes.
"Or efficiency could be increased. Given that we're wasting up to half our money on the biggest expenditure the federal government has (Medicare+Medicaid),"
Medicare is the most efficient health provider in the country after the VA. Unless you want to implement an NHS style health-care system, I don't see where your 50% figure comes from.
Even if we did, we still have lower taxes then most of the OECD. We have pension shortfalls, crumbling infrastructure, a massively unequal educational system, etc. Taxes need to go up.
Please provide evidence that freedoms, negative and positive, are less for the median person in Sweden then in the United States.
No, I'm quoting Professor Gelman's work on the relationship between income and voting. He runs a popular statistics blog and wrote a famous book on the subject.
Basic reading comprehension shows that the maps don't come from Amazon sales pattern,they derived their map from a sophisticated Bayesian multi-level model based on data from the National Annenberg Election Survey with over 100,000 respondents. The book is available on google books, and google scholar could show you most of the papers.
That seems a bit more rigorous then looking at political donations, due to the presence of bundling, don't you think?
I mean, you can be creative by looking at stated contributions from billionaires. Or you can look at over-all corporate contributions to Republicans far outnumber those to Democrats.
If you want to look at individual contribution, then you can look at the distribution of donation size for the Obama and McCain campaign. We both know how that would turn out.
"And again, it's not like tax cuts are a bad thing anyway. We pay enough as it is."
Not by any objective standard, no. As the population ages, taxes need to increase when most government spending is directed toward extremely popular programs for the elderly.
I understand how tax-dynamics work. Regardless, you made a claim that the rich don't care about income taxation when, objectively, tax cuts benefit them the most.
Sure, but their-debt to GDP rations are roughly constant. They go up during recessions, and go down during booms. Krugman had a graph showing such at some point. In general, their debt trajectory has been downward in the last 20 years.
"As for the states going bankrupt, I'm not sure if they would or not. They would be able to do things that the state governments aren't allowed to do if they were their own countries, too. (I'm not defending the states, by the way. heh.)"
They would! Greece is a basket case, but if you look at Spain, their government didn't do anything wrong. They maintained large surpluses for years, and were railroaded by the crisis. Once doube-digit unemployment hit them, that caused their economic problems. Large drops in revenue cause debt crises. If Spain had it's own currency, it could devalue to encourage export-driven growth. But it can't, and so they're suffering from overly
The macro-economic situation in Nevada is just as bad as it is in Spain, probably worse. It's just that the Federal government has been throwing money at them in the form of medicaid, unemployment, stimulus, tax-subsidized muni-bonds, and an implicit guarantee on their debt.
These are called fiscal transfers, and any successful currency union needs them in order to conduct an effective monetary policy.
"My point is: if all those European-"centric" countries are doing so well economically, why are they running such a high debt? We always hear about the huge US debt, but it seems to be smaller than most European debts. Maybe that's why some people in the US are so against certain European political methods?"
It's a dumb argument. The group of nations I was implicitly referring to, the Nordic block(Sweden, Norway, Denmark), has considerably lower debt then the US. Their model is pretty clear: High spending, high taxes, and very few regulations(Their tax code is roughly two paragraphs, and they rank well above the US in the "ease of doing business ranking").
It's led to higher growth, a higher GDP/capita, a higher median income, a better educated populace, well-functioning public transit in every city, and lower income inequality and higher social mobility then the United States. It would improve outcomes for roughly 98% of the population.
It doesn't happen in the US because the the rich don't like the higher taxes, a big chunk of the middle class looks at social spending as a evil plot to take their money and give it to dark people (I'm not being glib, opposition to social spending is pretty well correlated to standard measures of racial resentment like "Immigrants have made this country worse off"), and businesses love the complicated set of regulations and taxes that keeps away competitors.
If Nevada, Michigan, and Florida were their own countries they'd have gone bankrupt too. That's more the fault of the EU's lack of fiscal stabilizers then anything else.
Did you?
It terms of median income, most of the Western European countries are on par or ahead of us consistently, and work less hours.