Comparison of the Last Six Presidents

Donald Trump has made bold claims about creating jobs and addressing crime. In his February 28 speech to Congress he spoke of a 2015 murder rate that "experienced its largest single-year increase in nearly half a century". While it is true that the percent change from 2014 to 2015 was unusually large, the 2015 rate of 4.9 was still lower than at any time between 1965 and 2009. When I was a kid in the 1990s, the general consensus seemed to be that Democrats are the compassionate ones, but when you need to get the economy moving you need a Republican. The mythology of Ronald Reagan as an economic genius seems rather perplexing, as both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama achieved better reductions in the unemployment rate. Moreover, he achieved a decrease in unemployment at the cost of a massive increase in the national debt (even as a ratio to GDP). Trump now seems to have a similar economic plan to Reagan. Like Reagan, he plans to increase spending while decreasing taxes. Also like Reagan, the area he is most fond of increasing spending is the military. The other spending spree he wants to go on is border security. Whatever your opinion is on immigration, you have to admit that these types of spending are unlikely to generate any economic return (aside from the direct economic activity of government checks going to border patrol agents and wall building companies). At least if we spent money on infrastructure and education we would get some long term economic return. Spending it on border security will just give us a wall to stare at while we watch more and more of our tax dollars going to pay interest on the debt. 

A Program

On the one hand we have the Democratic Party, which limits itself to small programs that might help a small number of people. Just enough to give the appearance of being on the side of the working class and oppressed without upsetting their more important relationships with the rich and corporations. On the other hand we have socialist organizations, who tend to base their demands on the raw wants and needs of people without concern for what the actual effects would be if their demands were implemented. They usually explain this away by saying that if their solutions cause more problems than they solve, they'll just fight for more solutions to those problems. The only really important thing is to get people involved in the struggle. The problem is that before the socialists have a chance to explain why revolution is ultimately imperative, people have already concluded that their program is impractical, and moved on. Here is an alternative program I'm working on:

Three Key Pillars
Federalize All Taxes
A fundamental challenge to increasing taxes and government spending is that wealthy people and businesses will leave states and municipalities that have high taxes. Conversely, poor people may be drawn to locations with better welfare programs. This creates a situation in which a shrinking tax base supports growing needs. The solution is to have all taxes be collected by the federal government. Money would then be distributed from the federal government to the state, county, and municipal governments in amounts proportionate to population.

Welfare for All
However necessary they may be from a humanitarian perspective, welfare programs that only benefit people below a threshold of poverty will never be very popular. Even if it is a very small percentage of people receiving benefits, there is an awareness of the fact that some people choose not to be employed or only work part time for fear of losing there benefits. The solution is to provide the same welfare package to everyone. Specifically:
Free Post-Secondary Education
Education is a right that should not end with high school. Children should not be forced to choose between starting their lives saddled with massive debt or taking the risk of entering the job market with no post-secondary education. Providing this education will strengthen the economy, decrease social problems that are correlated with low education levels, and intrinsically improve the human condition.

Nationalized Healthcare
For too long our society has assented to letting people die who could be saved. What we need is not a public/private hybrid system that only brings us halfway there (nor Obamacare, which only brings us a quarter of the way there). We need to go all the way, with hospitals and clinics under public ownership.

Replace Social Security with a Flat Rate Public Pension
Perhaps it was political genius when politicians created Social Security eight decades ago: create a system that people depend on, but, unlike almost every other part of the federal government, make it dependent on a specific funding source. Then, when the system starts to fracture, the politicians can spend every election arguing about how to fix it rather than talking about real issues. The solution is to eliminate payroll taxes and pay for a public pension using general government funds. Social Security Disability benefits will likewise be replaced.

Food Stamps and Housing Subsidies for All (Sufficient to End Homelessness)
Everyone needs food and shelter, so everyone should be guaranteed some minimal level of these necessities.


Integrate Communities
There has been much focus on integration of schools, but is busing kids long distances really the best solution? What about when they get home? Can they really be put on a path to success living in an area of concentrated poverty (which likely implies an area of concentrated crime)? Do developers and municipal leaders have the right to build whatever kind of housing they want wherever they want if that means the right to force the poor into ghettos? Dealing with inequality will require integration of communities, not just schools. A possible plan would involve defining quartiles for home values. A neighborhood that is overweighted in one quartile would need to build more homes in the other quartiles before building any more homes in the overweighted quartile. Achieving full integration would be a long, slow process, but also very necessary.




Political Structure Reform
Replace Congress with a Unicameral Legislature with Proportional Representation
A person in Wyoming has 26% more influence over the House of Representatives than a person in California. In the Senate a Wyoming vote is worth about 67 times a California vote. People in the District of Columbia have no representation in Congress. Reform is needed, and party list proportional representation has the best promise of getting people involved in politics.

Ranked Choice Voting for Executive Offices
With ranked choice voting people will begin to vote for what they want rather than just voting against what they fear.

Some Additional Planks
These are not necessarily as unique as the Key Pillars, but they are still important planks that I think could gain overwhelming support.
Implement a Carbon Tax
We need to start treating climate change as the emergency it is. A progressively increasing carbon tax is the best way to do this. This would need to be coupled with the measures for making taxes more progressive at the bottom of the program. It would also require trade deals that account for emissions. 

Cap Military Spending at an Amount Equal to the Next Largest Military Spender
Do we really need a military that is more than twice as powerful as that of any other country. Currently, the second largest spender is China. If we matched our spending to theirs, we would achieve a 70% reduction, freeing up $416 billion per year.

Make Taxes Progressive
Eliminate Sales Taxes
Reduce the Corporate Tax Rate
Tax Dividends and Capital Gains at the Same Rate as Income
Increase the Maximum Income Tax Rate
Implement a Net Wealth Tax Similar to the Norwegian System

This Is Not The Right Year For This

I just don't think it's the right year. There's too much at stake, and a vote for Clinton is too risky. Firstly, we need to seriously consider the fact that Donald Trump has no chance of winning. As of October 28, the most recent poll shows Clinton ahead by 5 points. In 2012 the largest poll completed on October 28 showed Obama and Romney tied 48% to 48%. Obama still won, and not by a small margin. He won by 126 electoral votes. Romney could have won California and Oregon, and he still would have lost the election. To win this election Trump would need to get at least 63 more electoral votes than Romney won in 2012. The easiest way to do this would be winning the four states that Obama won by the narrowest margins: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado. (Of course he would also need to maintain all of the states that Romney won in 2012). Looking at some of the details of Colorado show just how impossible it will be for Trump to win that state. In case you hadn't noticed, this election is an interesting little rematch for the two major third party candidates. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson were the Green and Libertarian candidates in 2012. The Colorado vote totals in 2012 were 51% for Obama and 46% for Romney. Part of the reason it wasn't even close is that Johnson did relatively well there with 1.4%. I think it is safe to say that Johnson will improve substantially on that number this year. Personally, I would be very surprised if trump were even to win any of the other three states.

And what if Trump does win. We need to take an honest look at the fact that this scenario would not be the nightmare that liberals imagine. Donald trump is a notable candidate. Notable for his eagerness to offend people, but not particularly notable for how right wing his positions are. According to insidegov.com Trump is to the left of Ted Cruz in every category (individual, domestic, economic, and defense). He is left of Marco Rubio in every category except economic issues. Notably, his score for defense issues is identical to Clinton's. As for the crazy stuff that Trump has proposed for immigration policy, this is some of the least concerning, since it has no chance of being enacted even if he were to somehow get elected. Trump has made numerous enemies among Republicans in Congress. A Trump presidency would resemble something similar to Jesse Ventura's term as governor of Minnesota. Trump's proposals would be ignored and Republicans and Democrats in Congress would negotiate to govern without him. 

Then again, we must consider the possibility of losing the progress we've made. After all, Guantanamo is closed, and the wars in the Middle East have been ended. Actually, never mind, I just checked; 60 people are still detained in Guantanamo, and 8,400 troops remain in Afghanistan. What happened in Libya illustrated the fact that Obama oversaw continuation of the imperialist aggression that George W. Bush began. Any notion that the bombing of Libya had any humanitarian motives were shattered when it was revealed that the CIA had been collaborating with Muammar Gaddafi for its torture programs. Scott Horton wrote of the Justice Department's handling of this information, "But this very whitewashing raises fundamental doubt about the Obama Administration’s commitment to ending torture by American intelligence operatives. To the contrary, the Obama Administration’s handling of the matter appears to retain torture as a viable option for American foreign policy." Remeber that Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State during this time. Perhaps some of Obama's shortcomings can be explained by the fact that Republicans controlled at least half of congress for most of his presidency. We should look back to the golden age: 2009 to 2011 when Democrats dominated the Senate, House, and the White house, and the Holy Grail was obtained: healthcare reform. We on the left were hoping for nationalized healthcare: a free system under which the hospitals and clinics would not be controlled by for profit corporations. We were willing to settle for single payer healthcare. We didn't get that either. At least universal healthcare is progress right? Except that we didn't get that either. While I do recognize that Obamacare is a slight improvement from what we had previously (particularly for people who were unable to get insurance due to preexisting conditions), in the end we got regressive taxes on medical devices and Cadillac insurance plans, premiums that are continuing to become less and less affordable, and all for a decrease in the uninsured from 17.1% to 11%. 

Why waste your vote on Clinton when you have the opportunity to contribute to real change? Jill Stein will not win this election, but the more votes she gets, the more it builds the confidence of the working class, and develops a movement. Getting 5% of the vote in some states can result in important ballot access, major party status, and federal funding. The more people vote for Democrats, the more the cycle continues. People don't support third parties because they don't get many votes, and people don't vote for third parties because they don't have much support. 

What world will we live in twenty years from now? Will we be overwhelmed with refugees fleeing rising sea levels, water shortages, war... Will we be refugees? Will we tell our children that one day long ago we had an opportunity to build a movement that had the potential to create a rational economy and a real democracy, but that we didn't take it. Because we were just used to voting for the second worst candidate. 

Best Cities In The Best States

In my last post I ranked the states by debt to gross state product ratio and homicide rate. Here I will use two filters, and then four criteria to rank the best cities to live in.
First, I calculated the percent parkland of the top 13 states from my previous list. I'm using a very broad definition of parkland here. I used the sum of state park properties and National Park Service Properties. This included the acreage of parks, recreation areas, natural areas, historical areas, environmental education areas, scientific areas, forests, fish and wildlife areas, and miscellaneous areas from the Statistical Report of State Park Operations. I added this to the acreage of national historical reserves, historical sites, historical parks, recreation areas, and parks. I had to use some approximation for the second category because it was difficult to find breakdowns of acreage for national parks that span multiple states. Trails were ignored. I doubt that fixing approximation errors would lead to any change in the overall rankings, however.

State	Parkland %
Massachusetts	5.93
Washington	4.32
New Hampshire	3.90
Utah	3.20
Idaho	2.40
Wyoming	2.02
Vermont	1.14
Minnesota	1.08
South Dakota	0.81
Maine	0.65
Wisconsin	0.62
Nebraska	0.38
Iowa	0.20

I decided to focus on just the eight states with more than 1% parkland. I then moved on to ranking the cities. The four criteria for cities were Transit Score (as published on www.walkscore.com), weather, natural disaster risk, and air pollution. Generally, a Transit Score is only published if a city has a 2010 population greater than 200,000. This limited my analysis to just six cities in the eight states I considered: Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Boston, Seattle, and Spokane. I excluded Salt Lake City and Seattle because they appear on the American Lung Association's list of most polluted cities. I used a natural disaster map published by The New York Times to assign each city a relative risk (1 being the lowest risk and 5 being the greatest). The final formula to rank the cities was Transit Score/(natural disaster risk(temperature variance + mean number of rain/snow days per year)). Temperature variance is the sum of the differences of the July mean high and the January mean low from 70 degrees F. The final rankings and there scores:

Rank	State	Score
1	Spokane	0.211
2	Minneapolis	0.111
3	Boston	0.100
4	Saint Paul	0.086

Although Spokane is the winner by a large margin, further investigation led me to conclude that I will not be moving there for now. Spokane has no public universities. I think the presence of a large university (especially public universities) can be important for the cultural and intellectual health of a city. For now, I will be staying in Minneapolis, unless the weather gets even worse, in which case I might be moving to Boston.

Best States To Live In

This is the first of a two-part series on the best place to live. Here I will rank the states according to just two criteria: the ratio of debt to gross state product, and homicide rate. Unlike some other ranking systems, I wanted to use criteria that is completely objective, and criteria that actually measures how moving to the place is likely to affect you. For comparison, the American Human Development Index ranks states by health, education, and income. I don't think this criteria is bad, but just because other people in a state are healthy and rich doesn't mean that you will become healthy and rich just by moving there. A states debt can be expected to impact the level of government services you will receive relative to the amount of taxes you will pay. I used 'total state debt', which includes unfunded pension liability. I obtained gross state product from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Many people discuss crime rate, but I use homicide rate because it is a more reliable figure. Crime rate can be influenced by differences in reporting rates, and in differences in what is considered a crime from one location to another. Homicide has a nearly 100% reporting rate. While most people don't think of homicide as something they are seriously at risk of, it correlates with other crime that is more common. In the table the 2012 rate per 100,000 population is expressed.

Rank	State	GSP (millions)	Debt	Homicide Rate	GSP/(Debt*HR)
1	New Hampshire	64,697	18,425,567	1.1	3,192
2	Iowa	152,436	37,783,060	1.5	2,690
3	Vermont	27,296	7,866,666	1.3	2,669
4	Nebraska	99,557	13,139,045	2.9	2,613
5	Idaho	58,243	15,094,322	1.8	2,144
6	Utah	130,486	35,727,752	1.8	2,029
7	Wisconsin	261,548	45,026,643	3.0	1,936
8	Minnesota	294,729	85,879,526	1.8	1,907
9	South Dakota	42,464	7,707,458	3.0	1,836
10	Massachusetts	403,823	129,550,263	1.8	1,732
11	Maine	53,656	16,717,250	1.9	1,689
12	Wyoming	38,422	9,951,523	2.4	1,609
13	Washington	375,730	89,579,477	3.0	1,398
14	Indiana	298,625	46,377,635	4.7	1,370
15	Virginia	445,876	91,339,102	3.8	1,285
16	North Dakota	46,016	9,263,742	4.0	1,242
17	Kansas	138,953	39,025,693	2.9	1,228
18	Tennessee	277,036	41,049,738	6.0	1,125
19	Colorado	274,048	86,879,414	3.1	1,018
20	Oregon	198,702	86,678,268	2.4	955
21	Montana	40,422	15,769,183	2.7	949
22	Texas	1,397,369	340,944,239	4.4	931
23	New York	1,205,930	387,465,667	3.5	889
24	North Carolina	455,973	107,580,297	4.9	865
25	Rhode Island	50,956	18,863,153	3.2	844
26	Arizona	266,891	61,082,635	5.5	794
27	Florida	777,164	197,871,611	5.2	755
28	Hawaii	72,424	46,100,856	2.1	748
29	West Virginia	69,380	24,972,461	3.9	712
30	Delaware	65,984	15,991,093	6.2	666
31	Oklahoma	160,953	44,151,947	5.7	640
32	Georgia	433,569	115,193,862	5.9	638
33	Pennsylvania	600,897	184,903,767	5.4	602
34	Nevada	133,584	52,838,629	4.5	562
35	New Jersey	508,003	213,933,875	4.4	540
36	Maryland	317,678	94,211,004	6.3	535
37	Missouri	258,832	76,489,010	6.5	521
38	California	2,003,479	777,918,403	5.0	515
39	Connecticut	229,317	112,372,072	4.1	498
40	Arkansas	109,557	37,704,936	5.9	492
41	Kentucky	173,466	86,245,730	4.5	447
42	Alaska	51,859	29,780,396	4.1	425
43	Michigan	400,504	142,668,026	7.0	401
44	Alabama	183,547	68,343,597	7.1	378
45	Illinois	695,238	321,354,115	5.8	373
46	Ohio	509,393	321,340,764	4.3	369
47	South Carolina	176,217	71,105,557	6.9	359
48	New Mexico	80,600	50,137,504	5.6	287
49	Louisiana	243,264	83,280,815	10.8	270
50	Mississippi	101,490	54,686,815	7.4	251