NYT On Health Care

Posted on 2007-11-24 by David

I was impressed with the New York Times editorial The High Cost of Health Care. I don’t really have time to review it here right now (it’s quite long) but it is well worth the read and I would like to come back to it later to review it. They talk about some of the approaches to lowering our health care costs, but they don’t attempt to endorse any particular approach. I hope, and believe, that this was an attempt to paint a broad picture in advance of future articles which will explore the issue in more depth.

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Many Primary Ideas

Posted on 2007-11-20 by David

There are a variety of ideas for how we can fix our primary election process. They range from a lottery system proposed in comments and a post earlier on my site to more authoritative proposals such as rotating regional primaries as outlined by Trey Grason (go to page 25 of the PDF – hat tip the Senate Site)

Unfortunately, it is too late to fix the process for 2008, but steps can be taken for 2012. The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) is hoping to generate support for rotating regional primaries as a step toward that goal. The association’s bipartisan proposal, created by the nation’s chief state election officials, divides the country into four regions and establishes primary windows in March, April, May and June.

I was also interested in the proposal published in the New York Times by Jonathan Soros suggesting a national primary day where individual voters could opt to vote early.

There is, however, a simple way to establish a national primary and yet still allow retail politicking to meaningfully affect the course of the campaign over several months: allow early voting, with regular reporting of the tally.

Here’s one way it could work. Set a national primary date of June 30 and create a window for early voting that opens on Jan. 1. The early votes would be counted and reported at the end of each month from January through May. . .
If we began counting and reporting the interim results in advance of a national primary, the voters who cast early ballots would play the same role as voters in Iowa and New Hampshire do now: they could signal viability or create momentum for their favored candidates. These early voters would be self-selecting, trading the opportunity to watch the campaign unfold for the ability to demonstrate early conviction.

Most important, every voter, no matter where he or she lived, would have the freedom to make this choice. Right now, when one votes is determined by where one lives.

The national primary day has drawbacks, but I’m sure there are detractors to the rotating regional primaries as well and I know there are those who gripe about the lottery idea. I’m not ready to advocate for one idea over another, and I’m sure that all of them would offer an overall improvement over the current mess. What I would really like to see is an widespread, active, and public conversation now – not sometime after 2009 – to decide how we would like this system to operate because the current setup is going to lead to perpetual campaigning (like having candidates declaring six months into the four year cycle) unless we take steps to rein it in.

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Utah Legislative Tenure

Posted on 2007-11-16 by David

First I would like to thank Steve Urquhart for his comments. And in case anyone got the wrong impression, I had no intention to spar with Steve over this issue or single him out. I respect Rep. Urquhart for his openness on this and many other issues. He has convincingly demonstrated his honest belief that “sunlight [is] the best disinfectant.” The major reason that I singled him out is that I know that he is one member of the legislature that understands the value of blogging discussions.

All that being said, this post is mainly some of my further findings after his comments to my previous post. He said that term limits came in a wave in 1994, but it would be more accurate to say that 1994 was the tail end of the wave. 15 states enacted term limits before 1994, 3 more (including Utah) did so in 1994, and 3 have enacted term limits since 1994. Of the 6 states that have repealed their term limit laws (that’s 28% of states that had such laws), it appears that none of those laws ever lasted long enough to limit the term of any legislator. No state where term limits actually started limiting terms has gone back. My assessment would be that Utah retreated from that legislation prematurely.

The second part of Steve’s response was quite enlightening:

Of course, I realize that people can, and will, argue that we just want to hold the offices for life. That’s their right, and for some legislators it might be true. But people should consider the average lifespan of a legislator. In the House (largely through self-selection), it is right around 4 years. (I heard that number and have never independently verified it; but, it seems accurate. I’ve been there 7 years, and there aren’t many Reps who’ve been there longer than I have).

Since he had not verified the 4 year average I went to the website for the Utah Legislature (a very good site, by the way) and did some quick checking on the 75 members of the house and all 29 senators. In the Senate the mean term length is 7 years with an average of 6.93 so by the time we next have elections the average term will be sitting at 8 years (the longest current term being 18). 14 of the 29 have served between 3 and 7 years, most of the other 15 have served more than 7 years.

In the House, where Steve serves, the mean length of current consecutive service is 5 years with an average of about 5.2 so the average will be 6 years before we next vote. The are a number of representatives who have served 3 years or less consecutively who have previously served in the House, sometimes for more than a decade. If we factor in lifetime service for these representatives the average goes up to nearly 5.5 years. About 70% of the members of the house have served no longer than Steve, although there are many who have served 7 years like he has.

It is comforting to see that we have a pretty good rate of turnover in our state and I hope that it stays that way. So long as we have consistent turnover I think we need to focus more on correcting the imbalance of power between the major parties – as Obi wan had suggested – at least here in Utah.

Posted in State | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Term Limits

Posted on 2007-11-14 by David

I asked what people were interested in and the interest seemed to be term limits. I decided to do some initial research and found a good resource on term limits. The states that currently have term limits are:

  • ARIZONA
  • ARKANSAS
  • CALIFORNIA
  • COLORADO
  • FLORIDA
  • LOUISIANA
  • MAINE
  • MICHIGAN
  • MISSOURI
  • MONTANA
  • NEBRASKA
  • NEVADA
  • OHIO
  • OKLAHOMA
  • SOUTH DAKOTA

In addition I was surprised to find that Utah was on a short list of states where term limits had been enacted and later repealed.

  • IDAHO
  • MASSACHUSETTS
  • OREGON
  • UTAH
  • WASHINGTON
  • WYOMING

A little more digging and I learned that Utah enacted term limits by statute in 1994 (just before I was paying close attention to politics) and repealed them in 2003 before they ever affected any legislators (the limit was 12 years and the statute only lasted for 9). So now we know that our Utah legislature is not anxious to limit themselves.

Now I would love to hear from anyone who has experience in the states with term limits. Jason has voiced his unqualified support of the limits in his state. Does anyone else want to share? Are there any opinions on lifetime bans versus limits of consecutive years of service? I am not ready to choose sides on that yet.

I would also be interested to know more about the decision to end limits before they began in Utah. Perhaps Steve Urqhart might have some insights there that he would share (hint – information from 2003, or hints on where to get some would be nice because my short search led to a bunch of dead links).

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Step Forward on Education

Posted on 2007-11-12 by David

There has been lots of talk since November 6th about moving on to improve education after the defeat of vouchers. People on both sides of that debate have talked about working together towards a common goal. I have been happy with the tone of talk, but I have wondered what is the next concrete step that we can approach to demonstrate our genuine interest in improving education. After reading The People Have Spoken, and Fans and Foes Vow to Work for Change I have had an idea of where to take a next step.

I’ve never heard a credible argument against merit-pay or performance-based pay for teachers. Does this mean that I have not heard enough discussion on the subject or is it evidence that this might be an area where people who want to improve education can agree? I think that an effort to bring performance-based pay for our teachers would make a great demonstration of our commitment to making changes to improve our education system.

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Issues To Vote On

Posted on 2007-11-09 by David

While casting about for something to write today I began thinking about what issues are important to me. There are many political subjects I am interested in, but not always new material to write about. Sometimes there is discussion worth following that I don’t feel I have anything to add (like the current warm-fuzzies coming from the "let’s move on from referendum 1" discussion). Other times the news is truly dead or full of things I have no interest in. At those times I have subjects that I am interested in, but I am looking to discuss the issues and not just pontificate in a vacuum. The question is, what should I discuss that other people are interested in?

The answer seemed obvious – ask.

If I were talking about what modifications to our primary election system who would be interested? What if I were talking about the value of term limits for elected officials?

Based on past experience there seems to be some interest in those subjects, but I would like to hear whether others think those are worth discussing and would be interested in participating in such a discussion. Please let me know which of these would interest you – "both" and "neither" are perfectly valid answers.

Posted in meta | Tagged , | 11 Comments

Smart Presidential Candidate

Posted on 2007-11-08 by David

LaVarr Webb commented today in Utah Policy Daily on a great column by David Brooks at the New York Times called The Happiness Gap. Brooks was talking about the gap between how happy people are with their own lives and how optimistic they are about government. I think Brooks is right that people are beginning to see through the fallacy that government solutions can fix personal problems, or that one level of government can solve the problems in another level of government. The more we trust to the federal government the more apparent it is that the federal government is not equipped to solve problems created by poor state governments. The same logic holds true with each level of government – state government can’t solve county problems, county government can’t solve city problems, etc.

The thing that really got me was Webb’s concluding paragraph:

I’ve written many times that the job description of the federal government has gotten so immense that it’s impossible to accomplish, hence the deep cynicism about the federal government. The nation’s founders intended for the national government to focus on a few things and do them very well. We need a national resorting of the roles of the different levels of government. A smart presidential candidate would do well to pick up on the mood of the people. (emphasis mine)

Webb was right on except that his last sentence left one thing out – there is a presidential candidate who has picked up on this mood. Ron Paul’s campaign is based on the principle of resorting the roles of the different levels of government – primarily reducing the role of the federal government and allowing states to take their proper place in addressing more of the issues they face. Right now the federal government is doing so much that it can’t even adequately address those issues that are properly in the sphere of the federal government, like national security and immigration. So he may not have known it, but Webb just endorsed Ron Paul as a smart presidential candidate.

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After We Vote

Posted on 2007-11-07 by David

One of the greatest things about our country is what happens after we vote. Rarely is there any large shouting about unfairness – calls of “they stole the election.” Most commonly the prevailing attitude among those who continue to be active after the vote is summed up by the question that Jesse asked, “So now what?”

Let’s put this legislation to the side for a while. I know, it’s really tempting to touch up the defeated bill and wheel it on out again, but we have some real work to do between now and then. We need to spend the next five years addressing all of the criticisms we faced this year.

These comments were pointed at the voucher discussion, but the same attitude also relates to candidates who, until the vote, were contending for the same offices based on opposing positions. (For more examples of this attitude read the comments to Jesse’s post.) Once the vote is over, our best citizens offer congratulations to those who won, condolences to those who didn’t, and an invitation to everybody to come together and work to find solutions on the issues that were discussed during the campaign.

Sometimes we might think that voting is where we choose the solutions, but really that is where the work starts. We have chosen a direction as we select candidates and vote on issues, now we have to make the changes that we voted for and tackle the problems that we will face before the next election.

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The Government Hammer

Posted on 2007-11-05 by David

My father-in-law is known for saying, “When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Thomas Sowell talks about political crises created by Political “Solutions.”

Government laws and policies, especially the Community Reinvestment Act, pressured lenders to invest in people and places where they would not invest otherwise. Government also created the temporarily very low interest rates that made the mortgages seem affordable for the moment. . .

As for the flames sweeping across southern California, tragic as that is, this has happened time and again before — in the very same places in the very same time of year, just like hurricanes.

Why would people risk building million-dollar homes in the known paths of wildfires? For the same reason that people choose to live in the known paths of hurricanes. Because the government — that is, the taxpayers — will get stuck with a lot of the costs of dealing with those dangers and the costs of rebuilding.

Why is there such a huge amount of inflammable vegetation over such a wide area that fires can reach unstoppable proportions by the time they get to places where people live? Because “open space” has become a political sacred cow beyond rational discussion. . .

In other words, government preserves all the conditions for wildfires and subsidizes people who live in their path.

As for water shortages . . . The federal government’s water projects supply much of the water used in California that enables agriculture to flourish in what would otherwise be a desert.

We have created a culture where government is the solution to every every social “problem” (many times government is used to address preferences like open space which are not actually problems) just as technology is the solution to every technical problem. Lawmakers don’t intend to create crises, but crisis is the natural result when government gets involved in things that it was not designed to address (things like the cost of water or the price of home loans). In other words, if you have a hammer everything may look like a nail, but no matter how skillfully you hammer on a screw it won’t work like a screw – you need a screw driver to succeed with screws.

Posted in culture, National, State, technology | Tagged , , | 16 Comments

Missing the Mark

Posted on 2007-11-04 by David

I was gone for most of yesterday so today I saw the mail I got yesterday including a voucher mailing “Who’s opinion do you trust?” On the pro-voucher side they list four prominent state and national Republicans and on the anti-voucher side they list four prominent national Democrats.

I looked at the list of Republicans and 3 of the 4 I completely don’t trust (nor do they represent my values). Not much better than the 4 out of 4 that I don’t trust of the Democrats they showed. That’s hardly going to make me vote for vouchers.

Posted in State | Tagged , | 2 Comments