letter to my state senator who is running for governor re: property taxes

Hi Daniel

Happy New Year!  I hope you are doing well.

I read the article in the Sun-times today about politicians and property taxes which features you.  I didn’t know that property taxes were a big part of your agenda.

Did I ever tell you my plan for property taxes?  I’m sure I did, but maybe that wasn’t on your mind much back then.  I first really got interested and involved with property taxes a long time ago when I had been out of work for a while and then had to pay them.  The inherent unfairness of taxing someone on a nonliquid asset while having no real income got me to thinking.

Rich people want to be able to spend more on their kids’ education, and poor people don’t have enough money for many basic things.  I think rich people also like high property taxes as a way to keep rich neighborhoods rich. 

My proposal:

The state first determines a basic amount per student to provide an adequate, good education.  Let’s say $7,000 per student.  This amount would be collected through the income tax. 

Now, and this is very important this money must be raised and collected totally apart from the general fund.  I would say, first figure out what percentage of general revenues now goes toward education.  So we then, for example, would say, of the 5% current state income tax, 4% goes toward the general fund and 1% is the education tax. 

Add up the number of students in the state, multiply by $7K, and the education portion of the state income tax is adjusted to add up to that amount.  Say, add 2%, so the education tax is now 3% of income. 

Now every school taxing district will know that they are receiving $7K for every student in their district.  They know how much they will receive from the state, and this amount is then deducted from the property tax bills. 

If a richer area wants to spend more on education for their students, they are free to raise their taxes any way they see fit.  But everybody has at least the basic education funding that the state considers adequate.

There is also another very important part of school funding that needs to be addressed, and seeing that you are running for governor, this can give you a good boost.

People who want to send their kids to private schools now currently have to pay tuition and still pay enormous amounts to the state for public education.  I believe this is the main reason so many Catholic schools are going out of business.  A lot of people can’t afford both property taxes and tuition.  And they shouldn’t have to.

Anyone who pays tuition to a private school should be able to deduct that amount from their property or their income taxes, depending on which way you want to go.  But nobody should have to pay both.  But the amount of their deduction should not exceed what they would owe in taxes. for education.

The plan is simple and fair.  Some may consider the plan regressive, where poorer people are affected more by an income tax increase than richer people.  The easiest way to fix that is by raising the standard deduction. 

I know you favor a progressive income tax.  My biggest concern with that is that the state will then see this as an unlimited source of new revenue, when the state really needs to cut its spending in a major way.  Too many agencies with too many employees making too much money and with unrealistic, unsustainable pension liabilities.

You could make that the main part of your platform, if you really want to win.  Tell the people that you want to change the State Constitution to be able to change the pension plans to make them more realistic and in line with actual revenues.  And more in keeping with people get in the real, I mean private, sector.  I get about $12,000 a year of taxable pension income. 

Thanks so much!  I hope you actually read this and found it helpful. 

I wish you well.  I don’t normally vote Democratic, but if you agree with my plans, I could certainly reconsider.

Larry Craig

Why the Alabama Senate Election Should Concern You, and It’s Not What You Think

Alabama just voted to replace a Senator who was picked to serve in the President’s administration.  It was a very close election and was won by a Democrat.  If you support Trump’s agenda, you will be disappointed more than you would if the Republican had won the election.  That will concern a lot of people, but that’s not why I am writing this.

There are a number of reports of voter fraud: buses of people brought in from out of state to vote.  This is why automatic voter registration is a bad thing and why voter registration rolls need to be kept updated and cleared of non-eligible voters, like dead people, people who have moved, and non-citizens:  they provide more potential for non-eligible voters to vote.  This should concern all of us, but that’s still not why I am writing this.

The vote tallies were very close, but neither candidate received a majority of the votes.  This should make us hopping mad and prompt everyone to do something about it.   If not write letters or protest in the streets, we should at least agree that it is not right, needs to be changed, and we should at least talk about it enough so that maybe other people will do something that might lead to change.

Think about this for a minute.

We have 330 million people in our country, and the only two people we got to pick from for President were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.  Really? 

We have a two party system that tries to cram everybody into two polarized political parties that are getting further apart by each passing election.  On the Republican side, we had Republicans, Tea Party, and Libertarians competing for the nomination, and the Democrats had a Democrat, a Socialist, and I think the Green Party going for top honors.  And then we hear that the leaders of the Democratic Party rigged the system giving the Democrat their support in ways that made the Socialist lose in what would have been a much closer primary election if they hadn’t.

And then, of course, there are the independents and undecideds who can go either way, depending on what is trending in the latest news cycle. 

We are told that’s what the primaries are for, to weed out the candidates who have no or little chance of winning, but that is not the case at all.  If you have, say, 17 candidates running, like the Republicans did, and everyone got single digits in a primary vote, and one candidate got 30%, is that candidate the best choice?  We don’t know.  You still had over 60% of the voters who didn’t vote for him, or her. 

I had about 8 candidates that interested me, but I could only vote for one.  That’s no way to pick a candidate.  Let everyone vote for as many as they want, or maybe no more than 5.  Now that will tell you which candidate has the best chance of winning. 

But even then, when you get to the final two, one from each party, if a third candidate wants to run, it only screws things up.  People know he, or she, can’t win, but should they vote for them anyway to make a point?  Should they vote their conscience, or think politically?

What can happen in a three-way Presidential race, or in the Alabama race where write-in ballots were highly encouraged, is that a person can win the election with as little as 34% of the vote.  And that is just wrong.  And stupid. 

A President still needs a majority of the Electoral College to win, but the state elections don’t require a majority to win.  So you never really know who the majority of the people want. 

But you say we do.  We have the national totals.  But the Founders chose an electoral college system for choosing a President, but that’s for another article.  But simply, the Founders knew that people all over the country were different and had different needs, interests, and wants. 

Determining a President by popular vote would become a tyranny of the majority, where minorities of opinions would have less say in the final results.  For example, people who live in large urban areas tend to vote differently from people in rural America.  People in largely populated states vote differently than people in less populated ones.  The Founders wanted a President for all America, not just the most heavily populated states.

Our country needs third party or independent candidates.  We need more options in the final election.  And there is only one thing that makes that impossible in our political process, and it’s not money. 

Now money is certainly one of the reasons the system doesn’t want to change it or hasn’t changed it so far.  They don’t want to make it any harder for their candidate to win.  But raising or having a lot of money is not the main reason independents or third-party candidates don’t run.  It’s why we shouldn’t expect the system to change.  This is why ordinary people need to get involved, at least simply just start talking about it.

The only thing that stops a third party or independent candidate from running in most elections is that everybody knows that if you give your vote to that candidate, you are more likely to get the candidate that you don’t want the most a better chance of winning.

You are used to voting for one of the two major parties, but this time you are intrigued by the third person.  So instead of voting for whomever you ordinarily would have voted, you vote your conscience, taking votes away from the person you would have voted for, thus essentially giving your vote to the person you really didn’t want to win.

Nobody should have to make that choice.

Nobody should win an election without winning a majority of the vote.  The Presidential election is unique in that the Founders intended for states to have more of an independence than they do today.  Originally the Founders had state legislators choose their senators, because they wanted the Senate to represent the states.  The only people they wanted directly elected by the people were those in the House of Representatives. 

Yes, I know things change, but with too much change, you lose the country that we were founded to be in the first place.  That is why changing the Constitution is not an easy process.  We have the most stable country in the world because of our current system.  We have had the same Constitution longer than any other country.  And I think that has been a good thing.

So, every election should require a majority of the votes to win.  This is why we don’t get more choices, independent candidates. third party candidates.  This means there need to be runoffs in any election where nobody has the majority of the votes. 

Or a cheaper and faster way to go is that, when there are more than two candidates, allow voters the option on their ballot to pick a second choice.  This will allow people to vote for whom they really want rather than the lesser of two evils, in some cases.

This one change will revitalize our elections and break the two-party control over our lives.  Which, of course, it is why it will never happen.  Unless people start talking about it and demanding it.  If you personally don’t have the time or energy to actively work for change, at least just talk about it.  And eventually people who can do the work for change will be more inclined to do the work. 

This one change can do more in a positive way for our country than possibly any other one thing, except, of course, for term limits.  But that’s for another article. 

The bigger issue in the Christian baker case and why it affects all of us

The Bill of Rights lists some of the rights that our Founders considered to be natural rights.  These are rights that are not conferred by government but endowed to us by our Creator.  These rights are all things that we can do without government interference or are prohibitions on the government that might seek to limit those rights.  These also are rights that are foundational to what we are as a country and the reason for our existence.

The government is also free to create its own list of rights, but it cannot create new rights that supersede or infringe on the natural rights without destroying the very idea of our country.  Our natural rights would cease to be rights, and the Bill of Rights would no longer be a list of some of our rights but just a list of current laws subject to change, like our tax laws.

None of these natural rights puts requirements or restrictions on other people.  That is, I don’t have a right that depends on the government coercing the cooperation of other people to fulfill.  E.g. I don’t have a natural right to a home that must be paid for by other people.

The government could theoretically create a right of home ownership funded by the other members of the society.  What will inevitably happen as the government creates new rights is that conflicts will arise between the natural rights that our nation was founded on and the new rights created by our government.  If the new rights supersede the natural rights on which our nation was founded, then the foundation of our country has been destroyed, and our country is no longer the one that we had.  It would be no different if it had been taken over by a foreign power. 

In the case of the Christian baker who refused to make a cake in honor of a gay ‘marriage,’ the government-created right of not being offended requires another person to do something against his will.  Sometimes this case is portrayed as one of discrimination, but, no, the baker didn’t object to making the cake because the customers were gay, but because the cake celebrated something he considered to be immoral. 

Why are all these court cases involving Christians anyway?  Would there be a court case if the baker were Muslim?  Has anybody asked a Muslim baker if he would make a cake for a gay wedding?  Or a Jewish baker if he would make a cake in honor of Naziism?  Or a black baker for a KKK event?  Or a gay baker making a cake in honor of Focus on the Family, an organization commonly despised in the gay community for its efforts in opposing gay marriage?

Rather than focusing on whether a Christian wants an exemption from a law so that he can discriminate against a protected class of people, the real question is whether the government can create laws that supersede natural law and how that affects what our country is all about in the first place.  You make not like Christians or what the baker did, but once the precedent is set, you may find your own favorite right taken away or truncated next, as the government keeps expanding its role in our society.