“Yes on Prop1! (why I have changed my mind)

Wow, it’s hard to believe that I haven’t made a posting since March.  And the last one before that was November.  But then I have stated my commitment to put these musings on hold while I continue progressing through the script.  In fact, so solid is this commitment that I just realized that I wrote my last blog about the Visual Land tablet directly on the blog site instead of first drafting it on Word before transferring it. 

 BTW, the tablet tale has a happy ending.  We did indeed decide to keep it and I have especially been enjoying my own education on learning how to use one of these devices.  Though due to almost non-existent documentation (as has been so typical of the computer industry ever since the first PCs came out in the early 1980s), it did take me quite some time to figure out how to do very basic things like loading and opening files (since I had to have some basic understanding of Android before I could do any of that stuff), I have been enjoying this experience and have decided that I like tablets.  This is despite such a basic flaw as taking almost a whole week just to figure out how to turn it on since the instructions incorrectly stated to push the “On/Off” button for “a few seconds” to turn it on.  It didn’t work.  It was finally through something very serendipitous that I found myself unwittingly holding the button down for a full ten seconds that it went on.  This is why this is always so frustrating.  Why in the H-E-Double Toothpicks couldn’t they just say to hold the button down for 10 seconds rather than “a few seconds?”  After a week of trying to figure what might possible be wrong, I was about to call customer support when suddenly I found the key.  But why oh why does this stuff always have to be so bloody difficult? 

                Anyway, I now see the value of the tablet.  It doesn’t make any sense that they should run so much faster and more efficiently than a regular computer (since they have less memory and less processing power) but, for whatever reason, they do.  They do in fact run quite a lot faster and more efficiently than a regular computer.  They are great for reading books, newspapers and magazines, looking at photographs, general web surfing and short notes.  I do not think it works nearly as well as a regular computer for email and certainly not very well at all for long documents.  But files transfer back and forth with remarkable ease and, though they’re not ideal for making and editing work, they are very well suited for just reading finished documents.  And though I’ve never found any of these touch-screen computers and phones to be worth a damn, the touch-screen at least on this particular tablet works incredibly well, so well that I have rarely found it necessary to use the optional keyboard that came with it. 

                But the best news of course is that this is something that even Val can wrap her mind around and, though it’s taking quite a lot of lessons, she is slowly but surely getting comfortable with this 21^st century technology.  With the very controversial Prop 1 election coming up on Tuesday, I have given her an exercise to do that is getting her used to hands-on exercise with the tablet.  I found an excellent 54 page article on Ballotpedia that has everything – pro and con – one could possibly ever want to know about this ballot proposal.  So her assignment this weekend has been simply to turn on the tablet, load the Acrobat document that contains the article about Prop 1, and have her begin mastering the finger swiping movements necessary to navigate a document and make one’s way around the tablet in general.  So we’ll see how well she does with that and I’m confident she will succeed. 

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                And with that intro to Prop 1, it is now time to present my second posting for the year.  I’m sure that even most of you who are not from Michigan are well aware that our state ranks basically dead last in the nation in terms of the conditions of our deplorable roads.  In short, for years now they have been falling apart and have for the last couple years reached a critical stage where people are even being killed when their vehicle hits an enormous pothole and causes damage the equivalent of a head-on collision.  It has been a decade or more now that the Michigan legislature has been attempting to pass a bill that would fix our crumbling roads and freeways, but each time has ended with an impasse between Democrats and Republicans, the Democrats wanting a new tax, the Republicans wanting the job done with existing funds, funds that no one seems to be able to find.  Last year was the final straw when they failed one more time to pass a bill.  That is when Proposal 1 was drafted, a public intervention to allow Michigan voters the opportunity to either vote a new tax in directly themselves, or send the issue back to the drawing board. 

                What surprised everyone was how many people on both sides of the aisle came out strongly endorsing passage of this proposal that will be on Tuesday’s ballot.  Even our staunchly conservative Republican governor has been stumping vigorously for passage of this proposal.  But evidently the voters are not buying in.  If you believe the polls, public sentiment is overwhelmingly 2-1 against Prop 1.  Though everyone is in complete agreement that our roads are horrible and desperately need to be fixed, most everyone is also in agreement that this is not the way to do it. 

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Until about a week ago, I was against it too.  My objection stemmed from a report I saw on Channel 7 Action News that said there was a gigantic loophole in Prop 1 that allowed our politicians the “out” of spending the new tax on things other than road repair.  The best excuse that anyone could come up with for why they were endorsing it was that, though everyone on both sides agreed it was far from a perfect solution, the proponents said it was absolutely the best deal we could get and was a whole lot better than doing nothing at all.  And nothing at all was exactly what we’d been getting for at least a decade now. 

Sorry, this was completely unacceptable.  You can bet that anything that allows the politicians an “out,” that they will certainly take that “out.”  So we were going to be approving a new tax and the money would not be spent on the roads anyway so we’re just paying more money and ending up with the same roads anyway!  Nope, nope, nope!!!   Defeat Proposal 1!  Send it back to Lansing with the clear message that this is unacceptable, that they must write a bill that makes sense, a bill that’s going to work, a bill that’s actually going to get our roads fixed.  This is how I felt and, according to the reports, this is how the vast majority of Michigan voters all feel.  And this proposal is also proof positive that all the naysayers are wrong who believe that it is money and not democracy that runs elections.  Over 8 million dollars has been spent to promote passage of Prop 1.  Less than a million has been spent by those opposing it.  The underfunded opposition is winning by a landslide. 

That is how I felt.  That is how most Michiganders feel.  About a week ago, I changed my mind and now intend to vote yes on Prop 1. 

Either I misunderstood all the media reporting I had seen or it was just plain wrong.  And I was frustrated because every news feature I had seen failed to address what I considered to be the key issues:  where are the assurances that the money will actually be spent on the roads and why should we support it in the absence of such assurances?  I then found a treasure trove of articles on the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News websites that did indeed cover every conceivable aspect of the issue, both pro and con, and did an excellent job of addressing all my concerns.  If that wasn’t good enough, I found a 54 page article on Ballotpedia that has everything, both pro and con, that anyone could possibly want to know about this issue. 

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Here’s the skinny: 

Even though I strongly objected to the Republicans insisting that this new tax be used to pay off DOT debt for the first two years, I learned that only a relatively small portion of the new funds would be used for this purpose and that the Democrats also got some pretty handsome perks from the deal too.  The Democrats, ever the vigilant watchdogs for the poor, insisted that Prop 1 contain a provision for reinstating the EITC for low-income families such that the 1% increase in our tax would essentially become a wash for them so there would be no additional burden.  Prop 1 if passed will protect the poor and rather than having to wait two more years for road repairs, the proposition is really reserving most of the new funds for the roads and work will begin by October of this year. 

Even though I initially opposed the proposal, I found to my chagrin that I am in the company of the uber-conservatives I so object to if I continue to oppose.  I learned that almost everyone in opposition is just following the age-old conservative party line of “no new taxes.”  Of course, what I really object to about this position is that I believe it is wholly dishonest.  I don’t believe for a second that conservatives really oppose new taxes, but that they oppose all taxes.  I have never seen a conservative support any tax at all so I think it’s really quite hypocritical that they claim to oppose only new taxes when the truth is, if they had their way, they would abolish all taxes except for defense, police, and prisons. 

Well, I am not against taxes.  Taxes are what buy our liberties.  Taxes are what have built us into the most powerful nation in the history of the world.  Is anybody so naïve that they deny the connection between the facts that we’ve become the predominant world power since 1913 and that the personal income tax was passed in 1913?  No I am not against taxation, just against waste.  So is everybody else.  So what?  Let’s be realistic and practical.  What is waste?  Whether you want to call it waste, or pork, or boondoggle, or whatever other derogatory label seems desirable, it’s really just money spent on something you don’t approve of.  So those on the left consider defense spending wasteful and those on the right consider welfare to be the same.  Who’s correct?  It’s strictly a matter of personal perspective.  But one thing I know for sure.  We are a democratic society in which negotiation and compromise are the only ways to get things done and thus even the simplest things almost always become very complicated.  There are never ideal bills, never ideal budgets, and always something somewhere that people will consider wasteful. 

But please consider the other side of the coin.  Every dollar, and I mean every dollar, that gets spent is paying someone’s salary somewhere.  Every dollar that one person considers wasteful is in fact another person’s livelihood.  That is the nature of a democracy.  We compromise in order to get things done and some of those compromises pay for things some people will consider to be a waste.  But we do it because the only alternative is to do nothing at all and that is so much worse.  The democratic process works and has prevailed for 240 odd years because, as imperfect as it is, it is so much better than the alternative.  And the people support it not because it is ideal but because, though the system is intentionally designed so that no one ever gets everything they want, almost always everyone gets something and almost always that something is better than what they had before. 

So I do not support the position of “no new taxes” and I am practical enough to accept the fact that no solution is ever going to be perfect and no budget will ever be without so-called “waste.”  The main opposition to Proposal 1 is that the No New Taxes crowd seriously believes that if we just defeat this thing on Tuesday and send it back to Lansing, the politicians will be forced to find the funds for road repairs in our existing budget without adding to the tax burden.  This I believe is a thoroughly naïve position.  The main reason that Democrats and Republicans are in rare unison in supporting this measure is that for many years they’ve been trying to find the funds and have repeatedly failed.  Does anyone really believe this will change?  I do not, not for a second.  But this is what I do believe.  If Prop 1 fails and it all goes back to the drawing board in Lansing, the politicians will be forced by public pressure to find the funds and get the roads fixed without increasing taxes.  I can also guarantee that where they will find the funds is in programs for the poor.  If Proposal 1 fails, our roads will get fixed, but only on the backs of the poor. 

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Thus, if for no other reason, we should support Proposal 1 if only because it provides a guarantee of protection for the poor which they will certainly not have otherwise.  Monies will also go to support our very anemic schools, which is also not a bad thing.  Opposing the bill simply out of principle against “no new taxes” is not good enough.  Opposing the bill out of the naïve belief that it will force Lansing to find an alternative solution is certainly not good enough.  The final straw was when I learned that the Tea Party was one of the principal driving forces against this proposal.  That’s all I needed to know.  I’ve never made a secret of my extreme disapproval of all things Tea Party.  If I knew nothing else about Proposal 1 at all, the fact that the Tea Party is against it is reason enough for me to be for it. 

So I am voting “Yes” on Tuesday though I realistically expect that it will be defeated. I believe it will be defeated because most people admit that it’s very complicated and that they don’t understand it at all except that it means more taxes.  Hey, it’s not really that complicated.  So vote your conscience on Tuesday but please, do Michigan a favor and at least read the article on Ballotpedia before you decide that you really understand it.