If I were king...
Here's a list of things I'd change, do, legislate, whatever if I were king... (Not Steve King, by the way -- just your run-of-the-mill "king of the kingdom" type of king.) None of these are particularly well-thought-out, it's just things that ran through my mind today when I was supposed to be working.
1. No honking. I keep odd hours. It never fails to irritate me when someone pulls up in the street and immediately starts honking. If you're supposed to pick someone up, for Pete's sake, please get your lazy butt out of your car and go knock on their door. Or at the very minimum, wait for thirty seconds before you start blaring away with the horn. Don't sit in front of my house honking at ten o'clock at night. Or at ten o'clock in the morning. Or ever.
2. Don't park in my driveway. It's my driveway. Go park in your own.
3. Politicians should get paid the annual salary of their constituents. (I know, I keep harping on this one, but I really think it's a good idea.) That's one sure incentive for them to keep the economy moving... And I'm not talking about "we'll just pay them the median salary," I 'm talking about "everything they earn above the median salary gets donated to charity." No fancy speaking engagements for lots of money, no accepted donations... You gets what you gets. Around these parts, you gets about $37, 429 - IF your spouse works too. That's the median household income for Sioux City, and I don't know of anyone who has a single-income household.
4. If you catch someone dealing drugs, their banker goes to jail with them. That'd stop the major dealers, anyway. If they're banking overseas, well then, we go overseas and get the bankers.
5. Nicorette, the patch, hypnotism - they should all be government-subsidized so they cost the same as a pack of cigarettes. A few years ago I tried Zyban to quit smoking - it cost several hundred dollars. That's criminal. I remember back a few years thinking, "Gee, I wish I could afford Nicorette, I'd really like to quit smoking." It's easy to fund this program, just tax tobacco a bit more.
6. Make meals smaller. I don't really need a two-pound hamburger. The fries at McDonalds are great - but do you know how many calories are in a super-jumbo extra-large bucket of fries? Ye cats! We have salary caps - why not a calorie cap? No fast food joint shall be allowed to serve a customer more than 800 calories per meal... If society holds bars and bartenders responsible when people drink too much, doesn't it follow that we should hold restaurants responsible for people who eat too much? Generally I'm a staunch advocate of taking responsibility for your OWN actions, but I might make an exception in this case and make the grease-slingers quit handing out five-pound sandwiches.
7. Tax gas. A lot. Like, two bucks a gallon. This sounds goofy, but as was pointed out by West Cork elsewhere in this blog, it'd do us wonders. Figger your average family would spend an extra $4,000 a year on gas with this tax. We simply give it back to the family by cutting their payroll tax by $4,000. So, the family comes out even in the end. But suppose that the family should happen to switch from a huge gas-guzzling SUV to a nifty little hybrid, suddenly they'd be money ahead in the deal - and as a bonus, the environment is happy and we're not as vulnerable to overseas oil prices. It's all been worked out by people much brighter than I about thirty years ago, but the politicians will never go for it.
8. No family shall have more working cars than they have drivers. If you want to have an extra car or truck, fine, but you're gonna pay an extra tax for it. The tax money will go towards developing a hydrogen economy and supplying inner cities with bikes.
9. Term limits. A politician can be re-elected twice (making a total of three terms). After his three terms, he has to step aside for at least two years.
10. Policemen should live in the neighborhoods they patrol.
11. Politicians should, by law, go to two randomly-selected bars in their constituency every month, and announce that they're a congressman (or whatever). They then must sit there and listen to the people for a minimum of three hours with no news media hanging around.
12. Everyone who gets paid by the government should, by law, go work in the factory or packing plant or whatever one day a month so they know how the rest of us poor schmucks live and how hard we work. Maybe that'll make the grouchy lady at the driver's license place show a bit of respect. The point being that our lawmakers are horribly out-of-touch with the rest of us.
13. Churches are subject to the same financial laws as everyone else.
14. Separation of church and state means just what it says. If your faith in God is so thin that you need to see His name on a dollar bill, you need more help than you realize. (If you think about it, and stretch the logic a bit, isn't putting God's name on our money against God's will anyway? Doesn't that lead to us worshipping money? What about that whole "Thou shall not have any idols before me" thing?) The state should be completely neutral as far as religion goes - open and accepting of all.
15. Religious leaders shall not have political opinions in front of their people. They can spout their opinions all they want on their own time. Separation of church and state runs both ways.
16. "The Daily Show" and "Boondocks" should be mandatory viewing.
17. Lawsuits should be limited to damages and repairs only. No million-dollar settlements. If your lawsuit is judged to be frivolous, you shall be held up to the ridicule of your peers, and you shall pay all court costs.
18. It should be illegal to get more than one Visa (or MasterCard or American Express) application in the mail per month. (Illegal for them to send it, I mean.)
19. It should be illegal for anyone to charge more than 10% interest on anything, ever.
20. If you get money from the government, you should do the government some good. If you get food stamps, you should have to spend ten hours a week cleaning garbage out of the parks, or participating in a government works project, or something.
21. Courtesy, politeness, and manners should be the norm, not the exception. It should be taught in school. And at home.
22. "Oh, you're anti-choice? How cute. How many children have you adopted?"
23. All factories shall have their water intake pipes located downstream from whatever it is they're dumping in the river.
24. No one in the company, including the owner, should make more than five times the amount of the lowest-paid employee. If the boss wants to get paid more, well then, give the janitor a raise.
I know, there are good arguments against everything I've said. But this isn't meant to be a rational, well-though-out list, but rather a list of things that flit through my mind from time to time.
10 Comments:
Great stuff, Chris. However, the first time I read this I thought he meant "If I were Steve King" and that leant a whole different spin to the whole thing.
You know, I was thinking the same thing. But man, you are a good writer.
What does Stephen King have to do with... Ahh... You mean THAT King. The politician. (They both bring horror to mind, don't they?) Interesting.
I shall see if I can fix that.
I have serious problems with #7, raising the tax on gas. You play it off as zero-sum for the average family, and maybe it would be. And it's possible it would cause the wealthier amongst us to reconsider their SUV's, but more likely it would just cause them to pay more. A gas price jump from $1.50 to almost $3 didn't slow down the wealthy before.
But the biggest victims would be those already struggling. The poor can't afford to "switch from a huge gas-guzzling SUV to a nifty little hybrid," as you suggested. In fact, they're driving a car circa 1985-1995, and guzzling gas because they can't afford to do anything else. In Des Moines or a major metro area, maybe they could take the bus more. But in Clarinda or Emmetsburg or Shenandoah or Oelwein, they'd just be paying more for gas. A lot more. And they wouldn't get it back on their income taxes, because they wouldn't make enough to pay them, unless you want to give them a $2000 annual "continue to exist" stipend.
This fall, when energy prices were going up, Vilsack suggested people worried about it put in new furnaces. The problem was that the people with the least efficient furnaces have them because they can't afford anything else. This is the same problem.
The bottomline is, right now, if you're working a low wage job in a rural area or small town, drastically increasing the price of gas would make it cheaper for you to not work than make the effort.
KL
Wow, KL, way to bring sour grapes into it.
KL's negative nancying notwithstanding (albeit valid), I would totally live in this kingdom.
The anti-choice barbs, the no honking, excellent. I could do without anyone telling me to watch TV, I guess.
I'd like to add "or she" to all of your "he"s, but these oversights are bound to happen. Girls can be politicians, too.
KL - I agree with you. If my car were to break down tomorrow, I'd have to borrow money to get five hundred bucks so I could get another $500 rustbucket. I simply don't have the kinda cash it takes to get a hybrid, and neither do my neighbors.
That said, I stand by the concept of a gas tax as a concept. A lot of bright people have been working on this - I'm sure I simply misstated their proposition. In any case, I'm sure the idea can be tweaked so as not to have bias.
I remember laughing when Vilsack said that about the furnaces. That proved that despite his best intentions, he's out of touch. I see a lot of plastic bags duct-taped to windows in my neighborhood - the people can't afford decent windows, let alone new furnaces.
Chelsea - methinks more girls SHOULD be politicians. The boys have been mucking it up for way too long...
A gas tax can be a great idea, if it is done correctly. Here's an article that ran recently in the New York Times:
A Way to Cut Fuel Consumption That Everyone Likes, Except the Politicians
By ROBERT H. FRANK (NYT) 967 words
Published: February 16, 2006
SUPPOSE a politician promised to reveal the details of a simple proposal that would, if adopted, produce hundreds of billions of dollars in savings for American consumers, significant reductions in traffic congestion, major improvements in urban air quality, large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and substantially reduced dependence on Middle East oil. The politician also promised that the plan would require no net cash outlays from American families, no additional regulations and no expansion of the bureaucracy.
As economists often remind their students, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. So this politician's announcement would almost surely be greeted skeptically. Yet a policy that would deliver precisely the outcomes described could be enacted by Congress tomorrow -- namely, a $2-a-gallon tax on gasoline whose proceeds were refunded to American families in reduced payroll taxes.
Proposals of this sort have been advanced frequently in recent years by both liberal and conservative economists. Invariably, however, pundits are quick to dismiss these proposals as ''politically unthinkable.''
But if higher gasoline taxes would make everyone better off, why are they unthinkable? Part of the answer is suggested by the fate of the first serious proposal to employ gasoline taxes to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil. The year was 1979 and the country was still reeling from the second of two oil embargoes. To encourage conservation, President Jimmy Carter proposed a steep tax on gasoline, with the proceeds to be refunded in the form of lower payroll taxes.
Mr. Carter's opponents mounted a rhetorically brilliant attack on his proposal, arguing that because consumers would get back every cent they paid in gasoline taxes, they could, and would, buy just as much gasoline as before. Many found this argument compelling, and in the end, President Carter's proposal won just 35 votes in the House of Representatives.
The experience appears to have left an indelible imprint on political decision makers. To this day, many seem persuaded that tax-cum-rebate proposals do not make economic sense. But it is the argument advanced by Mr. Carter's critics that makes no sense. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how such a program would alter people's opportunities and incentives.
Some examples help to illustrate how the program would work. On average, a family of four currently consumes almost 2,000 gallons of gasoline annually. If all families continued to consume gasoline at the same rate after the imposition of a $2-a-gallon gasoline tax, the average family would pay $4,000 in additional gasoline taxes annually. A representative family with two earners would then receive an annual payroll tax refund of $4,000. So, if all other families continued to buy as much gasoline as before, then, this family's tax rebate would enable it to do so as well, just as Mr. Carter's critics claimed.
But that is not how things would play out. Suppose, for example, that the family was about to replace its aging Ford Explorer, which gets 15 miles per gallon. It could buy another Explorer. Or it could buy Ford's new Focus wagon, which has almost as much cargo capacity and gets more than 30 miles per gallon. The latter choice would save a whopping $2,000 annually at the pump. Not all families would switch, of course, but many would.
From the experience of the 1970's, we know that consumers respond to higher gasoline prices not just by buying more efficient cars, but also by taking fewer trips, forming carpools and moving closer to work. If families overall bought half as much gasoline as before, the rebate would be not $2,000 per earner, but only $1,000. In that case, our representative two-earner family could not buy just as much gasoline as before unless it spent $2,000 less on everything else. So, contrary to Mr. Carter's critics, the tax-cum-rebate program would profoundly alter not only our incentives but also our opportunities.
A second barrier to the adoption of higher gasoline taxes has been the endless insistence by proponents of smaller government that all taxes are bad. Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, has opposed higher gasoline taxes as inconsistent with the administration's belief that prices should be set by market forces. But as even the most enthusiastic free-market economists concede, current gasoline prices are far too low, because they fail to reflect the environmental and foreign policy costs associated with gasoline consumption. Government would actually be smaller, and we would all be more prosperous, if not for the problems caused by what President Bush has called our addiction to oil.
At today's price of about $2.50 a gallon, a $2-a-gallon tax would raise prices by about 80 percent (leaving them still more than $1 a gallon below price levels in Europe). Evidence suggests that an increase of that magnitude would reduce consumption by more than 15 percent in the short run and almost 60 percent in the long run. These savings would be just the beginning, because higher prices would also intensify the race to bring new fuel-efficient technologies to market.
The gasoline tax-cum-rebate proposal enjoys extremely broad support. Liberals favor it. Environmentalists favor it. The conservative Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker has endorsed it, as has the antitax crusader Grover Norquist. President Bush's former chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, has advanced it repeatedly.
In the warmer weather they will have inherited from us a century from now, perspiring historians will struggle to explain why this proposal was once considered politically unthinkable.
WC, that article is great even if it's not the best way to start a hangover day, but it doesn't answer my question: What happens to the poor, who pay minimal income taxes but still need to drive? How does this become anything but a tax shift to them and a zero-sum game for the middle class and wealthy?
The only answer I can think of is that the poorest receive 'earned income tax credits' when they file income taxes. Often it amounts to a substantial "refund" of taxes that they didn't pay, but are credited for anyway. I heard yesterday on NPR that over $2 Billion is sitting in the treasury unclaimed, because many low-income Americans just don't file tax returns. If they did, they would receive that money that was due them.
So not paying huge taxes should not necessarily be a stumbling block to get some of the monies back to lower income families. The problem would be in the short-term: how does a low -income family cope with $4 gasoline on a weekly basis, when they have to wait till February or March for their tax refund? If that can be solved, we may have a great tool to change America's oil-based economy.
I like the idea of raising taxes on gas. However, I would use that money to develop a bus and rail system, so people wouldn't have to drive everywhere. Right now, most of the taxes on gas goes towards building new roads and repairing the old ones.
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